Aodhán Ó Ríordáin (Dublin Bay North, Labour) | Oireachtas source

As the Minister knows, we are in the middle of a housing crisis and a homelessness crisis. We have a social housing crisis, a rent affordability crisis and an unaffordable house price crisis. The cause of these crises is an outdated, right-wing, ideological approach to planning and development which has led to a chronic underinvestment in public housing for the past 20 years and a housing market that is fundamentally broken. I represent the constituency of Dublin Bay North, which the Minister knows well. The hardest part of my job - the hardest part of the job for any of us in this House - is the hundreds of representations I receive every year from people in desperate need of adequate housing. There are more than 29,000 people on waiting lists in the greater Dublin area. In Dublin Bay North, there are 8,320 people on the Dublin City Council area B housing waiting list. Between January and September 2020, there were 196 allocations in area B, including transfers. At that rate, it would take 42 years to clear the list. People are suffering from the constant stress and fear of rent hikes or evictions. Some are living in overcrowded accommodation, with several generations of a family living in one house. There are some in severe medical need.

There are three practical things I would ask the Minister to do to address this social housing and greater housing need in Dublin Bay North. First, I ask him to work with my colleague, Councillor Alison Gilliland, and the cross-party working group in Dublin City Council, which is coming up with a new plan to deliver housing on the Oscar Traynor Road site. Second, I ask that the Department would pay for the community infrastructure required to support developments and that it separate those costs from the housing costs. The stand-off in this debate a few minutes ago calls to mind the attempts by Sinn Féin Deputies to pretend that they are hugely ideologically opposed to what the Government is doing. I would say to those who consistently vote down proposals for local property tax increases in the local authorities that this funding could go towards housing need, housing infrastructure and community infrastructure. It could go towards homeless services and sheltered housing. I do not see how anybody from Sinn Féin could side with Fine Gael or Fianna Fáil in local authorities to vote an extra €375 into the hands of somebody who owns a €1 million property. Let us have less of the grandstanding and populism and more of a realisation that this sort of vote, whipped by Sinn Féin, cost Dublin City Council €12 million that could have been gratefully received and used for the types of projects we are discussing.

Third, we need the Minister to finance Dublin City Council to allow it to accelerate its apartment regeneration projects across the city. This would improve not just the quality but the quantity of units. I know plans are advancing for Cromcastle Court in Kilmore and St. Anne's Court in Raheny, but there are many other opportunities. The current plan would take 15 years but, with a bit of ambition, there is no reason that we could not get it down to maybe half that.

Given the low cost of capital and the exorbitant rates being paid for the housing assistance payment in areas of Dublin 17 in my constituency, investment in public housing in Dublin Bay North will actually save the public purse money over the long term.

As well as the crisis in social housing, we have a crisis in homelessness, unaffordable rents and house prices all caused by a broken housing market. The Minister and I have spoken before about the potential for a rent-to-buy scheme. I know the Minister has shown interest in it and I believe it is one of the schemes we should recover and invest in again. The reason for the broken market is that we have a system and a Department, as far as I can see, that has been almost completely ideologically captured by the private sector mindset. No finer example of this can be found than in the strategic housing development, SHD, process. It is an anti-democratic process that has utterly failed to deliver units. Instead, it has had a less-than 30% success rate in five years. It has been publicly stated that the SHD legislation was delivered almost line by line by the Property Industry Ireland lobby group to the Department and the Minister's Fine Gael predecessor, the current Minister for Foreign Affairs, Deputy Coveney.

Now, we find ourselves with unaffordable half-empty high-rise buildings and unsustainable co-living applications that are entirely aimed at maximising the value of a single site instead of delivering sustainable and affordable housing across Dublin. The brutal truth has been highlighted in recent days by the Society of Chartered Surveyors Ireland report, which shows that high-rise buildings are more expensive. This exposes the lie that height is a panacea to our problems. We have to stop allowing developers to use the housing crisis as an excuse to ride roughshod over all the principles of sustainable and affordable housing, including the principle of having a planning process with proper scrutiny of planning applications and a development plan voted in by elected councillors who understand the dynamic of the local authority area. There are big questions that we need to address to do this, like the right to housing, implementation of the Kenny report and proper taxation of speculative development land. I call on the Minister to break the influence of the developers and hedge funds on the Department and to get rid of SHDs. The Minister has committed to doing this, in fairness to him. We need to reinstate the eviction ban, implement a proper rent freeze and ensure that the same groups which caused the last crash are not allowed to exploit this housing crisis for their own ends.

I appreciate I have not given the Minister much time for a response but if he wishes to correspond with me I would appreciate it, especially about the constructive suggestions that myself and my colleague, Senator Moynihan, have given to the Minister and the Department recently.

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