Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I have some observations on the specifics of the Bill. At one point, it states we need to counteract undue segregation in housing between persons of different social backgrounds. On the one hand, to any outsider, it would seem a laudable objective. Who wants segregation? In reality, however, for more than two decades I have heard this time and again, and each time the purpose of anti-segregation policy is not talking about the need to ensure people on lower incomes, from the Travelling community or from ethnic minorities should be given access to housing in Ailesbury Road, for example, probably the most segregated area in the country, or in any of the upper middle-class strongholds. No, not at all. What they mean is that we cannot have too many lower income tenants in any area where it is possible to sell houses to higher income brackets and where developers can make a fortune. The safeguard against social segregation only applies in one direction. It is not Vico Road they mean; it is Ballymun Road. They are talking, in reality, about stigmatising social housing and painting it as a refuge of troubled tenants and antisocial issues.

There is a way of avoiding social segregation. When we built public housing in the 1950s and 1960s, it was used to house everybody – teachers, bus drivers, butchers, civil servants and all others who could not pay private rents or afford to buy. The segregation happened because of a deliberate housing policy. It was not an accident. We can reverse that by allowing ordinary workers on average incomes access to public housing by widening the income brackets beyond what they are at present.

This Bill will not do that and is not designed to do it. Instead, it aims to reinvent the wheel with elaborate, complex and unworkable policies to build a new model of cost rental. If cost rental is affordable, rent, of course, will depend on what the cost actually is, something the Minister cannot tell us. Cost rental will still be pegged in some way to the market, not to people's earnings. Differential rents set by local authorities, on the other hand, were truly cost rental and truly affordable. This Bill will not address that basic issue, and no amount of wishful thinking or rhetoric from the Minister can hide that.

See this speech in context