Dessie Ellis (Dublin North West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Since the Government was formed the Minister has been promising to deliver affordable housing. He has had sufficient time to explore options, and if this is the best he can come up with, then we have a real problem. The idea of a shared equity purchase scheme that is being put forward by him simply will not work. I would argue that it is worse than similar schemes in the past. History has shown us that schemes like the one the Minister is proposing have proved disastrous for people and have inflated house prices. As Deputy McAuliffe and the Minister should know, we are still dealing with the repercussions and consequences today of the earlier scheme which was introduced originally in the 1990s and 2000s.

In my experience, I have found that many of the people on this earlier scheme ended up accumulating huge and unsustainable debts, forcing them to go from mortgage to rent after having paid their mortgage for many years along with their rent, as the scheme entailed.

This new scheme will prove equally disastrous for people in the long term and will undoubtedly result again in inflated house prices, which the ESRI and others, as well as members of the Minister's own party, have warned the Minister about. I am concerned that the scheme is a throwback to the mistakes made during the period of the Celtic tiger. I am also concerned that the subsequent collapse of the economy lay in part with the misconceived dependence and reliance that Fianna Fáil placed on developers to build affordable housing.

We need to look at and expand on existing housing projects such as the Ó Cualann Cohousing Alliance, which as a proven track record of providing realistically affordable housing over the last years. My colleague, Deputy Ó Broin, our spokesperson on housing, has put forward viable and realistic options for affordable housing, for example, through the delivery of public housing by local authorities, approved housing bodies and community housing trusts, by increasing capital expenditure, setting realistic prices for affordable housing and so on. I recommend these solutions to the Minister and urge him to consider a realistic and workable scheme that will not result in inflated house prices.

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