Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I will share time with Deputies Catherine Murphy, Fitzmaurice and Healy.

We support the motion because our solutions to the housing crisis are better than the Minister's solutions. It is as simple as that. We want a site value tax to bring development back into the core, the Minister is following an old-fashioned sprawl development model. We want better building regulations, the Minister has been lowering apartment standards. We want a cost rental model to bring the price of rental properties down, the Minister is just pouring billions into the housing assistance payment every year, which is a subsidy to developers. We want tight vacant and derelict site charges, the Minister wants to give back the city and not take it back. We want Part V to be strengthened, the Minister wants to sell State land to private developers. We fundamentally disagree politically and that is what this vote is about.

We do not trust the Minister's numbers. Today, the Taoiseach said the numbers do not lie. I will give one example. Part V figures show the number of houses built supposedly jumped from 37 in 2016 to 522 in 2017 but of those, 55 were second-hand homes in Dublin City Council's area that were never built but bought off the market. Another 148 were long-term leases under Part V which were not actually built. We do not trust the Minister's figures and we do not like the solutions he proposes. He stands for the status quoand we want change.

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