Donnchadh Ó Laoghaire (Cork South Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Most of the people I grew up with cannot afford a home and have no hope of ever having a permanent one. Some will. Some will qualify for social housing and may get that after many years waiting. However, for the majority a permanent home is hard to imagine and out of reach. This is crushing and frustrating. It makes people so angry to spend so much money on rent that it stops them putting any kind of deposit together. It is one of the biggest issues that comes to my constituency office and I am sure to the Minister's as well - people who simply do not feel they have any hope and find it impossible to imagine planning for the future. I have the discussion with them and tell them there is talk of a scheme like this or another like this and so on but what is there in concrete terms? What can we actually offer them? In reality, in the vast majority of situations the answer is effectively nothing. There is nothing for these people. They fall between the cracks and have no support, and this is a huge category of people. Thus affordable housing is absolutely key.

What is the point of having a big fanfare for a so-called affordable housing scheme if it is out of the reach of the people who I grew up with, out of the reach of those it is meant to be for? It is pointless. Unless we invest significantly in cost rental and cost purchase, all of us will be confronted in years to come by people who are frustrated and angry that they have been locked out of getting a permanent home because false options - illusions like this - fail to deliver for them. It may deliver for the developers, and handsomely, but it is not going to deliver affordable housing. It is going to deliver something that is just going to cause more frustration, anger and people locked out of the communities they want to live in.

The solution is in cost rental and cost purchase. If I were the Minister, I would look to the fact that most local authorities around the State have banks of land they would love to build affordable housing on. However, unless something is done to assist them with the debt attached to that land, it will hold back schemes, for example, in Cork city and county. It will make them unaffordable and unviable. The Minister would be far better served by talking to those local authorities about how he can relieve them of the debt on that land so they can deliver affordable housing on it. As for this scheme here, the ESRI, the Central Bank, the Institute of Professional Auctioneers and Valuers and the former Secretary General of the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform all have concerns it will increase the prices of houses. Even Fine Gael councillors on Dublin City Council and some Green Party Deputies think so. There are very few people for this, and for good reason. It is going to make it harder. This scheme is not the solution. We all want solutions but this is adding fuel to a fire that is out of control. Affordable housing can be delivered through cost purchase, cost rental and assisting local authorities with their debts, not by assisting developers.

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