Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE) | Oireachtas source

The private developers say, "Jump" and Fianna Fáil asks, "How high?" It is still firmly the party of big builders and private developers, and this is just the latest proof. In recent weeks we have had the LDA legislation, which is potentially the biggest giveaway of public land and public wealth to profiteers in the history of the State; we have had an attempt, thankfully knocked back, to unsafely reopen construction at the behest of the Construction Industry Federation; and we have this shared equity scheme. As has been mentioned repeatedly, the consensus on the scheme is very clear with the people who are meant to be and are advising the Government, the ESRI, stating clearly that it will very likely lead to higher house prices. It is not necessary to be a genius economist to work that out. If more money, in this case public money, is chasing the same number of houses, the result is that house prices will increase significantly.

Many ordinary people could reasonably ask why the Government is so dead-set on doing this when everyone is advising it that the effect will not be to make homes more affordable for ordinary people, but to drive up house prices and line the pockets of private developers and big builders. The answer is staring us all in the face. It is because that is what Fianna Fáil wants to do.

Let us consider the origin of this scheme. It did not appear in the Fianna Fáil election manifesto. It was not a Fianna Fáil policy. It comes from policy papers published by Irish Institutional Property and Property Industry Ireland last year. The Irish Timeshas reported that one of the State's most senior officials warned that the building industry had lobbied for such a scheme "because it would increase prices". This is not the first time they did such a scheme. Similar logic lay behind the so-called help-to-buy, in reality help-to-profit, scheme of the previous Government, lobbied for by the CIF to try to increase prices to try to line its members' pockets.

It is supremely ironic for the Minister to accuse the Opposition of being blinded by ideology and so on. This is an intensely ideological position. The Government has the view despite all the advice it has been given that the best way to spend public money to resolve the housing crisis is not actually to build genuinely affordable and public houses for people. Instead the Government is adopting a supremely ideological Thatcherite view of basically trickle-down economics. The belief is that if we give a bunch of money to private developers, some of that will trickle down to ordinary people in the form of homes even though it is very clear that will not happen. Once again there is the happy coincidence of the ideology of capitalism and neoliberalism with the interests of those who form a core base of support, whom Fianna Fáil and the Government represent - the big construction companies, big developers and big builders.

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