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

In the programme for Government, it is stated that the Government should be tested on its ability to deal with the housing crisis and provide social and affordable housing. On Friday, the Minister produced a regulation on affordable housing stating that somebody on €45,000 a year should be paying no more than 35% of their income, which would be €998 per month. On the front of today's edition of The Irish Times, we have an account of the Land Development Agency, LDA, which the Government set up, proposing affordable housing that would be €1,300 a month for a site in Shankill in respect of which we have been campaigning for five years to get council and affordable housing. That is not affordable, even by the Government's own definition of affordability. Furthermore, there will not be a single council house. The Taoiseach said earlier on that he is not ideological. That is ideological. Under the guise of promises about affordable housing, the Government is privatising public lands for unaffordable rents and preventing the construction of the council housing that we actually need.

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