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

The Taoiseach did not have to finish the sentence. A dog whistle is a dog whistle, half sentence or full.

When Fintan O'Toole wrote last week in The Irish Timesaccusing the Government of supporting an ideology, which contains "a profound class prejudice against social housing", he hit the mark.

The Taoiseach made that attack when criticising comments I had made suggesting that public land should not be privatised and should be used entirely for both social and genuinely affordable housing. Income thresholds for social housing should be raised to include more middle income earners, young people and workers on the average wage currently locked out of the housing market. The State should directly engage builders, write off land prices and VAT and offer genuinely affordable housing at cost price. Rather than sell to developers and define "affordable" as being exorbitant market rates minus a discount, such a model could cut the price of affordable homes from €300,000 plus to less than €200,000 and a 50:50 social and affordable mix is a good mix to build new communities. Who could argue with that? The Taoiseach could and so too last Tuesday night could the Minister for Housing, Planning and Local Government. He stated that we must avoid "failed policies that did not work before such as building giant social housing estates." Was Ballyphehane a failure? How about Marino or Drimnagh? Was Gurranabraher a failure? These schemes rescued a generation from the lanes and slums. This generation needs to be rescued from being forced to live at home with their parents into their 30s, from sky high rents which have gone up again today and from the hotels, bed and breakfasts and Garda stations.

The Government is not letting a good crisis go to waste. It is exploiting it to push a privatisation agenda. The Government's vision is for 87,000 households to be housed with housing assistance payment, HAP, landlords in the years to 2021. If that effort was put into building an equivalent number of social homes, €23.8 billion would be saved over 30 years. The Government preaches prudence to the people but the same does not apply when steps are taken to enrich the landlords. The Government wishes to privatise public land and sell houses at unaffordable market rates and unaffordable so-called affordable rates. I conclude by asking the Government to stop the privatisation madness. There is enough public land in the hands of the National Asset Management Agency, NAMA, and the local authorities alone have zoned enough residential to build 114,000 homes. How can the Government disagree in the face of all of this evidence that building public homes on public land on a major scale is the only way to go?

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