Gino Kenny (Dublin Mid West, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

People have run out of adjectives to describe the housing crisis. There is a simple reason for it. It comes down to ideology of and the Government's neoliberal policy for the past seven and a half years.

I want to address some of the terminology Ministers have been using which I find quite offensive. Using terms such as "ghettoisation" and "free homes" is insulting to anybody who has ever lived in a council house and I call on the Minister for Housing, Planning and Local Government to withdraw them. The Government goes on about the mistakes of the past. However, the provision of social housing has been a social success; the Government's housing policy has been a social disaster. Social apartheid is ongoing.

One of the best examples of the crisis is in Clondalkin. A publicly owned 70-acre site is to be sold to a developer on Monday owing to a policy of the Government and the local authority. I say to our colleagues in the Labour Party and Fianna Fáil that there is an onus on their councillors to vote against this deal. At the height of the worst crisis in our generation we are selling public land to a developer. We cannot do so; the land needs to stay in public ownership.

Today has been fantastic and it is just the start of a bigger movement across the country, but I do not believe the Government is capable of changing the situation. It is bedded down by ideology which is impossible to change. The only way to get rid of the Government is by holding a general election, for which the people are crying out because the longer Fine Gael is in government the more social damage it will do.

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