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

The Minister of State, Deputy English, accused some of us on this side of the House of not liking facts. We very much like facts, but the facts regarding what the Government is delivering in affordable and public housing are pretty grim. In the first six months of this year, the Government delivered 203 council houses in the four Dublin county councils, 16 of which are in Dublin city. That is a disastrous failure. If the Minister thinks it is not easy to deliver council houses, I ask him to explain to me, please, how this State built 38,450 houses in the 1930s, 52,500 in the 1950s and 61,953 in the 1970s but in the eight years that Fine Gael has been in government it has managed to build 3,148 council houses. We could do it when this was almost a Third World country but the Government cannot do it when we are one of the richest economies in the world. That is not an accident because there is another set of facts summed up by these headlines from the past year or two: "Cairn Homes profit jumps 191%"; "Cairn Homes founders receive €61.4 million in share awards"; "Profits at Ires Reit more than double during first half of 2018"; "Cerberus paid just €70,000 tax on Irish profits of €20m"; "Profits soar at one of Ireland's most well known developers". The last headline refers to Park Developments. The list could go on. Those are the facts.

NAMA has flogged €30 billion worth of property and land. The Minister may state there was no money for public housing when Fine Gael came into government, but we had NAMA, which had land, building and assets. However, Fine Gael allowed it to flog that land to property developers and speculators who are now selling it back to the State at massive profits and will walk away without paying any tax. The Government cannot even tell us how much tax has been forgone through the section 110 tax relief afforded to such speculators. That is a scandal, not an accident. Those are the facts.

The crisis can be resolved by building public housing on public land. Why does the Minister insist on telling fibs about Rebuilding Ireland? He stated that under Rebuilding Ireland the Government was going to add 110,000 social housing units. According to my copy of Rebuilding Ireland, 87,000 of those units will be delivered under the housing assistance payment, HAP, and the rental accommodation scheme, RAS. That is not social housing. Rather, those are tenancies which the landlord can pull out of at a couple of months' notice and land those people back into homelessness and emergency situations. Those are the figures provided by the Government.

See this speech in context