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

I ask the Taoiseach simply to scrap the strategic housing development scheme as a complete failure. We discovered from a report published at the weekend that it is essentially a scheme dreamed up by property developers who gave the then Minister for Housing, Planning and Local Government and current Tánaiste, Deputy Coveney, their recommendations. The Government took those recommendations lock, stock and barrel and stuck them into the housing Bill. Fast-track planning for property developers was supposed to deliver more housing, particularly affordable housing, to help deal with the housing crisis. However, work has not commenced on 10,000 of the 16,000 units that got such planning permission. There has been no effort by the developer to put in commencement notices for 41% of the units. In other words, as some Deputies have been saying to the Government all year, this was a licence for speculation, hoarding and driving up the value of particular sites. There are some such sites in the area I represent, such as the Bartra co-living site and a site where apartments were to be sold for €1 million each, which would do nothing to help the housing crisis. The scheme has been a licence to hoard, speculate and print money for private developers but has delivered almost nothing in terms of actual housing. I am suggesting that it should be scrapped.

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