Jan O'Sullivan (Limerick City, Labour) | Oireachtas source

The Minister will lose this vote and the motion will be passed tomorrow. The Minister needs to take notice of it and act on it. We have seen many motions before which the Government has lost but we have seen no action on them. This one has to make a difference and the Minister has to take action.

Whatever about the 47 Members who signed the motion, as well as the Fianna Fáil Party which has now joined us, there were thousands on the streets today at a large rally. There were trade unions, which represent thousands of people around the country, campaign groups, housing agencies, Traveller representatives, the National Women's Council of Ireland, students' unions and concerned citizens who want a fundamental shift in policy to deal with the housing crisis.

The Minister must listen to that and make a difference for the thousands of homeless people, the tens of thousands who fear losing their homes and all of those low and middle income earners who see no prospect of a secure home to rent or to buy. They can wait while the Minister keeps telling us to trust him that he knows what he is doing and it will be all right. That is not good enough anymore. We need that fundamental shift in policy which we are asking for in this motion.

We have come together with a common voice on this motion and made specific proposals. The Minister challenged us, claiming we did not make specific proposals. There are specific proposals in this motion. On behalf of the Labour Party, I published the affordable housing for all strategy, a comprehensive document containing specific proposals on housing. We do not want to hear we are not bringing forward solutions: we are.

The Minister spoke about mixed tenure but he needs to recognise that social and affordable housing is mixed tenure. It is just that it is not making huge profits for private landowners.

The most important part of the motion is the need to shift policy from hoping the private sector will do most of the heavy lifting, because it will not, to publicly led action. That means committing sufficient money and public lands to build social and affordable homes now. It means protecting those whose homes are rented rather than the owners of those homes. These are the core demands in the motion.

Changing the Constitution to include a right to a home would alter the balance between the rights to property, already enshrined in the Constitution, and the right to the fulfilment of one of the most basic needs of any person or family, the right to have a secure roof over one's head. All of the actions called for in our motion make sense. The fundamental shift we want is for the Minister to look at the housing crisis from the point of view of those who need a home rather than those who own property. That is the policy shift we and the crisis are demanding.

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