Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

The Minister should stop trying to throw mud in people's eyes with his political attacks on the Opposition, which are designed to do nothing other than deflect from a deadly serious argument about an issue which is absolutely critical for vast numbers of people. Even if we set aside all that has been said about a return to Fianna Fáil's past with regard to developers and so on, at the most elementary level, the scheme the Minister has designed is thoroughly misguided.

The problem is that house prices are completely out of reach for 70% of people. It is not just about the €75 million in this scheme, which the Minister says is only a small amount of money which we should not be we worried about. It is about everything the Government is doing to address the housing crisis, which is based on the pretext of accepting market conditions. Instead of trying to make unaffordable housing genuinely affordable, the Government is trying to bridge the gap with a credit scheme which, as has been said, inflates the prices and makes sure that the developers who build the houses still make handsome profits on a totally dysfunctional, unaffordable market. That is what it is doing, instead of trying to make house prices affordable and deliver public and affordable housing. The only logic of that is to sustain the private property developers because it does not make sense from any other point of view.

It is shocking when one looks at the figures. Even the property people are amazed at what is happening in the property market at the moment. The value of residential property is now €536 billion, which is up €18 billion in the last year. The property market is already out of control. For example, in my part of Dublin city, the average house prices are €600,000. That means that about 90% of working people are priced out of the market. Instead of driving down those prices by delivering public and affordable housing on public land, the Government is trying to bridge the gap with the State essentially subsidising through credit schemes. That is absolute madness and it is a recipe for disaster in the future. We are saying not to do that.

It is not just about redirecting €75 million, because the LDA is based on the same misguided premise of following market conditions. We are going to move into the public land bank, which is the key to actually driving down the cost of housing, and we are going to marketise 50% of it or more. We will make a bad problem worse and throw petrol on the fire of a property market that is already out of control. This is utter madness. The Minister says we do not have a solution but we do. We have been arguing for public housing on public land and during the term of the previous Government, when it suited him, the Minister argued for that too. Does he know how many council houses the Fianna Fáil-led council built last year in Dún Laoghaire? One. This year, one house is going to be built. All the rest of the housing is being sourced from the private market in one shape or another. That is what is actually going on. I appeal to the Minister to stop putting mud in people's eyes, confusing them and trying to politicise this in a cheap way. The Government is making the same disastrous mistakes of the past instead of addressing the underlying issue and building, at scale, public and affordable housing on public land.

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