Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, Solidarity) | Oireachtas source

I am sharing my time with Deputy Barry. There is an horrendous housing crisis. It is a crisis of massive unaffordability. Half a million young people are stuck at home unable to afford to move out. We are aware that over 10,000 people are homeless. This is a significant understatement because of the cooking of the books by the Minister. There are those who face rent increases, with the average rent in Dublin now being over €2,000 per month. It is going only one way. It is an absolute crisis for ordinary people.

What is the answer of Fianna Fáil? It is to abstain next week on a motion of confidence in the Minister for Housing, Planning and Local Government, who is responsible for this crisis, thus allowing him to continue with the same policies. It is to vote at Dublin City Council and other councils to privatise public land to be used by private developers as opposed to using it for the building of public housing. It is to bring forward proposals like this that will fundamentally make no significant difference by way of making homes affordable. It is tinkering around the very edges of a system. Why? It is because Fianna Fáil is locked into the same market mentality as Fine Gael. The thinking is that the private sector can best deliver housing and other services and facilities despite all the evidence to the contrary. The mentality is, of course, informed by unprecedented rent going to developers and landlords, including corporate landlords, and unprecedented profits going to developers. These are the people whom Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil represent. They are the ones benefiting from this crisis.

The proposal creates the illusion of doing something but it would make no difference in making housing more affordable. There is nothing in the Fianna Fáil proposal to reduce housing prices or provide affordable housing for purchase or rent.

About 64% of the workforce is on less than the mean income of approximately €38,000 per year. Approximately 1.2 million workers are on €30,000 are less. These people simply cannot afford the Minister's so-called affordable price of around €310,000, a figure the developers set to ensure they can generate a profit. This is a principle that Fianna Fáil also supports.

These Fianna Fáil proposals would do nothing to reduce prices for first-time buyers. If Fianna Fáil genuinely wanted to make housing available and make it available in the area of zoning in the novel way in question, it would propose that the council zone significant, strategic plots of land for public housing to form a core of mixed-use, higher-density sustainable developments that would have public transport integrated into the design. I refer to sustainable settlements along the lines of the Vauban and Rieselfeld districts in the city of Freiburg in Germany.

There is a need for 500,000 new housing units by 2040. Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil are committed to having the private sector simply deliver these. It will do so in a dysfunctional, unplanned way without proper public transport and infrastructure, and without building the communities in which people want to live. The only answer is to break out of the market straitjacket that Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are determined we should be in. The answer is to develop a green new deal with socialist policies on public housing that set out to de-commodify housing as opposed to making it something that the rich can profit from and that represents a crisis for ordinary people. The caps on access to social housing should be abolished. Anybody should be able to gain access to social housing. That means that a massive programme of building genuinely affordable social housing is needed. Some 100,000 homes are needed over the course of the next three years. They should be built to a passive standard. This means proper rent controls.

In order for any of this to happen, the rule of the landlords and developers in this country needs to be broken. The starting point for that is mobilisation. Mobilisation is required to demand that these things happen. It is clear that Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael will not do it of their own volition.

Those who are planning and organising for the demonstration on 5 December at 12.30 p.m. in the Garden of Remembrance are stating in the Facebook group today that they should be doing what the farmers are doing on the streets, that is, mobilising in big numbers and showing their power.

I encourage those looking at what is happening this week and what will happen again next week, with Fianna Fáil allowing these policies to continue, to get out on the street, mobilise on 5 December to build a housing movement and argue for socialist policies.

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