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

The Government has claimed it is supportive of a mix of social and non-social housing. A mix of people with different family sizes and in different income brackets is a reasonable aspiration although the net effect has been to, effectively, prevent large-scale social and affordable housing developments on public land because they are tied up with convoluted formulas around social housing that never seem to get resolved.

I put it to the Taoiseach that his stated aim of a mix of social and non-social housing is, in many cases, turning out to be something more akin to social cleansing or social apartheid. A report emerged today which stated that half of the counties in the country are unaffordable for first-time buyers. In those counties, and mine is one of them, people on low and middle incomes are being driven out. They are being cleansed from the area. These areas then only become places where very rich people can live. That is what is actually happening. There is a small number of developments where we are supposed to get a social mix on private developments with 10% social housing under Part V of the Planning and Development Act 2000. That is not happening in a number of those cases, particularly and disgracefully in strategic housing developments which involved fast-track planning and were supposed to deal with the housing crisis. What is actually happening in a development in Dún Laoghaire is that an extra 60 houses will be built and no social housing. The law allowed for that through some convoluted arrangement with the developer.

In areas of high property value, social housing is being provided off-site so there is no social mix. The social housing is somewhere else because we could not have people on low incomes living in certain areas. Even in areas where that 10% is being provided, the social housing element is being segregated in separate blocks, usually with one or two-bedroom units and no family-sized units in many cases, and where the specifications of the social housing element are considerably lower than the houses built in the non-social part of the development. That is social apartheid, not social mix. It is institutionalising and underpinning segregation of people on the basis of their income levels. Does the Taoiseach think that is acceptable? What is he going to do about it? What is he going to do about the fact that strategic housing developments are, in some cases, not delivering any social housing whatsoever? Does the Taoiseach think that is acceptable?

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