Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

On 3 October the National Homeless and Housing Coalition, the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, housing non-governmental organisations, NGOs, such as the Peter McVerry Trust, Simon Communities and Focus Ireland and housing activist groups such as Take Back the City and many others are calling for a major national demonstration at Leinster House to demand emergency measures to deal with the spiralling housing crisis. The protests follow the magnificent protests of mostly young people in the Take Back the City movement who have occupied scandalously empty residential properties that could be used for housing to highlight the obscenity of people suffering from homelessness. Let us be clear: they are not protests for the sake of protesting, rather they are driven by intense frustration at the Government's continued policy of relying on speculators, vulture funds and corporate landlords to resolve a housing crisis that the very same people created in the first place, a failed policy that continues with the Land Development Agency initiative, the continued sale by the National Asset Management Agency, NAMA, of public land, including the former John Player Wills factory site, and scandalously section 110 tax reliefs whereby billions of euro is going into the pockets of vulture funds, the local infrastructure housing action fund, LIHAF, and Home Building Finance Ireland, HBFI, whereby we are financing private developers to build, in some cases, on public land, run away with the profits and charge astronomical rents and property prices, while all the while obscene profits are being made as the housing crisis gets steadily worse and the human misery it causes continues.

The protestors are demanding a change in policy. They are saying: stop selling public land to vulture funds and speculators, start an emergency programme to build public and affordable housing on public land, introduce rent controls, adopt robust and aggressive measures to go after empty residential properties where there is no justification for a property lying empty when it could be used to house those who need housing, stop evictions into homelessness - nobody should be evicted into homeless - and establish a constitutional right to secure affordable housing.

Does the Taoiseach think that rather than seeing paramilitary policing methods, with men in balaclavas, used against peaceful housing protesters - young protesters, in the main - some of whom were hospitalised such was the aggression used against them during the protests, and recognising that his policies have failed to address the deepening housing crisis, he might listen to the demands of the protesters? While he is at it, will he repudiate the unbelievable suggestion made by the Minister for Justice and Equality that gardaí should no longer be recorded in the conduct of their duties when it would amount to censorship of the press and the public in the context of their right to oversight of the heavy-handed policing tactics we saw used on North Frederick Street?

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