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

Has the Taoiseach read the NESC report on land management produced in April 2018? I ask this because it will explain to him what those of us who will be marching for emergency action on the housing and homelessness emergency on 1 December want and the sort of radical change in policy we are looking for. What the NESC report does is set out examples of what is done in places like the Netherlands and Austria. The contrast with the policies the Government has pursued on housing is stark in the extreme. It points out that in Amsterdam, for example, 80% of zoned building land is in the hands of the state, which does not sell it. Some 30% of Dutch housing stock is social housing, which contrasts with 5% here because of the failure of the Government to build social housing. In Austria, between 2000 and 2014, the austerity years when Irish Governments slashed housing budgets, helping to generate the current housing crisis, the Austrians did the exact opposite. Between 28% and 36% of all housing built in Austria in that period was social housing. It is extraordinary. In the period when we stopped building social housing, more than 30% of all of their housing output was social housing.

Does the Taoiseach see the point? The Government is selling off public land and allowing the private market to dictate, and we have a disaster. However, in other countries of Europe land is kept in public use, strict land management policies apply and a large amount of social housing is built.

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