Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to speak to the motion, as I have spoken to every motion on housing since I was elected. It is significant that we are just over 70 years on from the UN Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 which enshrined a number of rights in Article 25, at which the Minister might look, particularly the right to food, clothing, housing and medical care. This and previous Governments have utterly failed to comply with that article.

There are many good aspects to the motion. It seeks to declare that shelter is a human right, acknowledge that rent prices are soaring, recognise that over 10,000 people are homeless and so on. In seeking the declaration, the acknowledgement and the recognition the Labour Party utterly fails to declare, acknowledge and recognise the integral role it played in implementing a housing policy that has led us to where we are. It is important to say this because if it is recognising that it was wrong, that is good, as we all make mistakes. However, it had a golden opportunity when in power with an overwhelming majority. In fact, today we had the undignified spectacle of the senior Minister telling Labour Party Members they did not take their chance, trading insults and telling them that they were irresponsible. When they were elected in 2011, they were fully aware of the extent of the housing crisis because the construction of social housing had ceased in 2009. As an experienced councillor, with my colleagues, I repeatedly invited them to Galway and told them that they were creating a nightmare by not building houses. Did they recognise and tackle that problem? Quite the contrary; they intensified the reliance on the private market which had utterly failed and continues to fail to provide homes for citizens. They enshrined this reliance on the market in legislation and fundamentally changed housing policy by introducing the housing assistance payment and informing local authorities that it was the only game in town.

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