Róisín Shortall (Dublin North West, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

There is no doubt the housing crisis is one of the main challenges facing the country and the failure to address this crisis represents a major failure of responsibility on the part of the Minister. Ensuring an adequate supply of housing at affordable cost is a basic responsibility of any Government. The Minister has abdicated this responsibility by outsourcing it to the market. The market is only concerned with the profit margin and, therefore, takes no responsibility for the social and economic welfare of people. That should be the job of politics.

With regard to housing, the Minister speaks a lot about supply. While it is important to maintain a strong supply, the basic rules of supply and demand do not apply to housing. The reason for this is that the cost of land is the key determining factor when it comes to the cost of housing. While supply is obviously very important so too is affordability. This is a reality that is ignored by the Minister. We only have to recall what happened in the boom. There was an oversupply of housing but critically prices kept spiralling. More supply in the absence of affordability means many people overextend themselves with borrowing. We saw the awful consequences of this during the crash.

If the Minister were serious about the housing crisis he would set out to drive down the cost of housing for buyers and renters but this Government and the previous Government set out to do the very opposite. The former Minister for Finance, Deputy Noonan, admitted as much. Government policies set out to bolster house prices rather than drive them down. The help-to-buy scheme is a case in point. So too is the new affordable scheme. Both of them accept the inherent unaffordability of housing as a given and merely offer some discounting on these inflated prices so the root cause, the high land cost, is not tackled. It is quite clear the balance sheets of the banks have been of much more concern to the Government than ensuring people have homes.

The Minister is very fond of referring to the Opposition's criticism as ideological but his heavy reliance on the private sector is entirely ideological. Fine Gael never sees itself as having any responsibility for the public good or public provision. It sees housing as a commodity to be bought and sold for profit rather than an essential part of people's lives. Not only is Fine Gael leaving housing to the market but the policies it is pursuing are clearly designed to maintain the high cost of housing and there are umpteen examples of this. The Minister refuses to adequately fund local authorities and instead pours hundreds of millions of euro of public money into the pockets of landlords through the housing assistance payment. This in turn drives up rents. It means private renters must compete with housing assistance payment tenancies. It also means house buyers, particularly first-time buyers, are squeezed out as they cannot compete with landlords. The recent practice of local authorities being encouraged to buy rather than build social housing also squeezes first-time buyers. All of this conspires to keep house prices and rents high while guaranteeing high returns for investors.

Equally, the failure of the Minister to tackle land hoarding in any effective way means people struggling to buy a home are at the mercy of developers who bought land at inflated prices during the boom and are now slowly releasing it in a way that maintains high land values. The site cost is now a major factor in high house prices. This is a far greater factor than the cost of building. I do not recall the Minister ever identifying the high cost of land and the problem of land hoarding as a factor of the housing crisis. I wonder why this is the case.

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