Mick Barry (Cork North Central, Solidarity) | Oireachtas source

I am sharing time with Deputies Bríd Smith and Gino Kenny. This debate is about housing solutions, so I will speak directly to that issue. The first solution is to build public housing on public land. Mel Reynolds, who is a housing commentator and expert, has said we have enough public lands in this State to build 114,000 public homes. The Government's plan for public lands depends on the new Land Development Agency, which generally favours a 60:30:10 ratio. That means making an arrangement with a private developer for 60% of the homes built on a development to be sold at market rate, 30% made available for affordable schemes, and 10% used as social housing. Under that approach to our public lands, a little over 10,000 social homes would be built when we could have a multiple of that.

The Government's definition of an affordable home, broadly speaking, is one that costs €50,000 less than the market rate. That is not affordable in my book or as far as many young workers or those on average incomes are concerned. Affordable housing should be provided at the cost of building. The cost of State land should be deducted, taxes should be waived and the builder's profit kept to a minimum. I will speak more about that last point in a moment. The State could also provide interest rates close to 0%. If all those costs were stripped out, they would amount to 50% of the cost of a home. The Government should be able to provide homes, which would cost €320,000 at current market rates, for little more than €160,000. The 114,000 houses which could be built on public lands should be 50% social housing and 50% affordable housing on that basis.

We also need drastic cuts in rent prices. A five-year rent freeze is on the cards in Berlin. We need to go further than that and introduce rent control measures which cut rents because they are currently unaffordable. We need to ban evictions into homelessness, pass the Anti-Evictions Bill 2018, make eviction on grounds of renovation illegal, and make the sale of property as grounds for eviction illegal, as is the case in Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Denmark.

Finally, we need to give the State the wherewithal to build houses. That means going beyond direct labour units in councils, which we had in the past, and nationalising the construction industry. Let us put the construction industry under public ownership in order that the public interest can be put first, rather than the profits of the few. That would be beneficial for building housing, as well as for projects such as the national children's hospital.

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