Mick Barry (Cork North Central, Solidarity) | Oireachtas source

Other Deputies have chosen to address President Juncker primarily on the issue of Brexit. I choose to address him on an issue no less important, which is now an emergency in Irish society. There is a housing emergency here. Rents skyrocket and 10,000 are officially homeless. More than 500,000 young people are locked out of the housing market, unable to afford rents, let alone being able to afford the purchase of their own home. The Irish State has billions of euro in the Ireland Strategic Investment Fund and in the National Asset Management Agency, NAMA. We need to spend this money on social housing. This is where President Juncker comes in. We are told again and again that the money cannot be spent because it would breach the EU fiscal rules that he helped to design, that it would breach the expenditure benchmark and it cannot be done on the balance sheet. If our parliamentary grouping held the reins, we would build the houses and break President Juncker's fiscal rules-----

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