Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

If I was concerned about the new Government and new Minister before tonight's speech, I am even more concerned having listened to his words. Nothing in the speech from the Minister or the Minister of State would not have been said by Deputy Eoghan Murphy in this Chamber only a matter of weeks ago. The former Minister may not be here in person but his spirit is very much alive and well on the Government's benches.

Let us unpick some of the claims. The serviced sites fund is a good fund but it is not being used properly. Homes in O'Devaney Gardens, with €50,000 per unit from the serviced sites fund, will cost a first-time buyer €360,000. Enniskerry Road in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown, which is cost rental, has €80,000 per unit from the serviced sites fund, and the rents will be €1,200 per month. Neither are affordable to the working families who we all represent. In County Cork, the Minister is not including the cost of the equity stake of the State which the home buyer will have to pay back. When one adds that on to the full price, it goes from €248,000 to €273,000 if the full €50,000 serviced site fund is allocated. Again, that is not affordable. If one takes the same shared equity model in Part V, and the Minister, Deputy O'Brien, knows that I support the increase of Part V, these will not be genuinely affordable to hard-working families. I am even more concerned by what I hear from some industry lobbyists, that they want a private sector shared equity proposition, which would be even more bizarre.

The most remarkable thing that we have heard this evening is the Minister, Deputy O'Brien, arguing against limits on price, because that is exactly what was in the Fianna Fáil election manifesto. It referred to €250,000 or less, a clear limit on price. Today, we have the first Fianna Fáil U-turn on its election manifesto commitments. In fact, limits on price are the only way to guarantee genuine affordability. If the Minister had done his homework and read the circular that I sent him five weeks ago, he would have seen that the Sinn Féin model mixes limits on price and affordability based on net income. It is the very centre of our proposition. I was glad to hear the Minister say on the radio today that he will review the income limits set by Fine Gael of €75,000 and €50,000. If he had read the details of our proposal, it includes exactly the same proposition published five weeks ago, and we will happily work with him on that.

The local infrastructure housing activation fund, LIHAF, has been an abject failure. It was meant to deliver 20,000 homes, including a large number of affordable homes, by 2019, and it has done none of that. The Minister may come to the launch of my detailed analysis of LIHAF later this week. I will send him an invitation. We are calling for that scheme to be scrapped. It has not done any of the things that it was meant to do and it is a waste of taxpayers' money. The biggest problem is that we are not hearing anything new about the Land Development Agency, LDA. We will not have the answers to the questions I will ask until the legislation is published but, for example, will the LDA still be a commercial designated activity company? Will it develop unaffordable, open market price homes on public land? What percentage will be social? What percentage will be affordable? What will the price of those units be? If one looks at Shanganagh Castle in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown, neither the rental nor the purchase units will be affordable to working families. Will all of its activities be subject to freedom of information? Not just some, but all, including its commercial activities. Will it have comprehensive compulsory purchase order powers, because the programme for Government is silent on all of that?

I was delighted that the Minister, Deputy O'Brien, true to form, mentioned his famous 2018 affordable housing motion, a motion so bland that I cannot even remember if it contained any commitments. If the Minister tabled it again tomorrow, I would vote against it. What the Minister failed to tell the House is that we tabled a motion with seven specific additions and he voted against every single one. He voted against increasing capital investment in public housing, increasing the Part V commitment, giving local authorities more staff to deliver social and affordable homes, and also against amending Home Building Finance Ireland to deliver genuinely affordable homes for working people. He voted against credit unions lending for affordable housing, which is absent from the programme for Government. He voted against the redesignation of approved housing bodies and against ensuring the local infrastructure housing activation fund was used for affordable housing. They were in the amendment that we tabled and Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael voted against them. That tells us that the Minister is all talk. Where is his plan? When we see his plan, we will judge it, and when he starts to implement it, we will judge it by delivery.

On the basis of what we have seen today, this is the same Fianna Fáil speaking out of both sides of its mouth. It supported Fine Gael for four years while criticising it. The Minister now says he will do something different while implementing exactly the same housing policy as his predecessors. That is why his opposition to our motion tonight shows, just as it was before, that nothing has changed and that this crisis will unfortunately get worse.

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