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

This Government, as with the previous two, will be judged on its response to the housing crisis. All the now-governing parties – Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Green Party – had a hand in the creation of the circumstances we are currently in. I refer to the unprecedented level of homelessness and to the hundreds of thousands of people affected by the housing crisis. Political choices, particularly by the last couple of Governments, have allowed the crisis to worsen further to protect the soaring profits of the big landlords and developers whom they represent.

The housing crisis is and always has been avoidable. An interesting figure from the last month illustrates that point in a small way: there was a drop of 500 people registered as homeless by comparison with the month before. There is no mystery there. The number has fallen because evictions have been banned. The socialist left has argued for a long time that we should ban evictions but Fine Gael fought the evictions ban and it fought the rent freeze tooth and nail. It denounced it as unconstitutional and impossible to achieve. It took a global pandemic to implement a temporary ban on evictions and a rent freeze. Even then, the measures were taken extremely reluctantly. Unfortunately, all the indications are that this Government is going to offer more of the same.

We should examine the promises concerning new public housing builds. Somehow Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Green Party have managed to negotiate a programme for Government and collectively come up with a commitment to build less public housing than was referred to in the Green Party manifesto, the Fianna Fáil manifesto and even the Fine Gael manifesto. Perhaps the Minister can explain how the parties all managed to negotiate each other downwards to a point below where each started. The programme for Government refers to increasing "the social housing stock by over 50,000 over the next five-years, the majority of which are to be built by local authorities, Approved Housing Bodies and State agencies". That is actually a commitment to build 25,001 houses, with all the rest potentially being acquisitions. A majority of the 50,000 is to be built by some of the bodies in question, and this indicates the same sort of tricking around with the figures as practised by the last Government and the pretence that HAP houses or long-term leases by councils and big handouts to developers and landlords represent social housing. It simply will not work, except to further enrich the landlords and developers.

I will be supporting Sinn Féin's motion. In saying that, I do not believe it goes far enough. Some 20,000 homes per year is still short of what is possible and what has been achieved in the past. It is short of what is necessary. We need to build at least 33,000 new homes per year for the next three years.

There is an important omission in the motion. When we are campaigning for the building of public housing, we must always say we want the houses to be of passive-housing standard. A public housing programme is part of a green new deal. In addition to having retrofitting programmes, we must say when building houses that they should be built to passive-housing standards. This should be seen as providing potentially hundreds of thousands of green jobs.

Who should be doing this? It is not enough to say local authorities should be designated to lead. The essence of a left-wing housing policy is to decommodify housing. Housing should not be something from which landlords and developers make profits; it should be provided so people can have a decent place to live. That means taking the profit motive out entirely and nationalising the construction companies, big corporate landlords, land banks and vulture funds. It means developing a State construction company given a mandate to truly resolve the housing crisis through the mass building of public housing and making public housing accessible for all, with enough public housing built to allow for the removal of the income caps and to decommodify housing.

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