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

The reason we have a housing crisis is the Government, and the two major parties, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, believe that housing is a means to make money for certain people in society. The Irish rich have always got rich through property. The property owners who see property as a means to make money are disproportionately represented in this House and the Irish rich disproportionately, in international terms, get rich from property. They do not want to resolve the problem and their commitment to making money from property is the reason we have a housing crisis.

Tragically, an economic crash in 2008 that was caused by the greed of people making money out of property, rather than leading to people saying we need a fundamental rethink and that housing should be seen as a human right to be provided by a decent society, has been used as an opportunity, primarily through the vehicles of the banks and NAMA, to further enrich a certain layer of people who make money from property.

What I heard the Minister, Deputy Murphy, talk about earlier is just rubbish. He said we were moving in the right direction in the same week that Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council, which is dominated by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, and assisted by the Green Party in this particular instance, flogged off land wholly owned by it in Cherrywood to - guess who - Johnny Ronan. The boys are back in town, facilitated by the State and the major political parties. When we opposed the plan to sell off that land, we were told by the council that it could not be used for council housing. Apparently, there were some problems with the land. It was too low or something like that. All of that was rubbish because it has now been sold to Johnny Ronan, one of the guys who helped crash the economy, and he will build 140 apartments there and make a lot of money from them.

We are hearing a lot of nonsense from the Government while in reality the policy continues to be to see land and property as an opportunity to enrich the rich and make them richer. That is the reason the crisis continues to escalate. For the Government to say it is moving in the right direction in some sense is nonsense. Its own targets, which it has missed, were pathetic in the first instance, as we have been saying since Rebuilding Ireland was launched. To try to solve a massive social housing crisis when three quarters of social housing provision will depend on the private sector was a disastrous policy in the first instance and guaranteed to continue the housing crisis but the Government has not even met its own pathetic targets.

Whatever minimal progress was made in the past year or two, it will get worse in the next few years. We had a small increase in social housing in Dún Laoghaire and other places because the pressure was on. When we look at what is in the pipeline in many areas, social housing provision will diminish in the next few years. Only 56 houses will be delivered in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown in the next two years and the target is 1,500.

People have to get out on the streets. As in the case of water charges, unless we have tens of thousands of people affected by this housing crisis out on the streets in Dublin on 9 March, which is the next opportunity to do it, we will not resolve this diabolical, shameful housing and homelessness crisis.

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