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

For 15 years I have been campaigning to get public and affordable housing on the Shanganagh prison site, so the Taoiseach should not say that we do not want affordable housing. Fianna Fáil- and Fine Gael-controlled councils in our area have not seen one sod turned and now the Government wants to hand it over to the LDA. People need to read the Bill. The only mention of social housing in the Bill is in reference to concluding arrangements with commercial investment vehicles. All of that land is to be set up as designated activity companies. In other words, the privatisation of the entire public land bank. That is the agenda. The Taoiseach should not forgot that it was Fianna Fáil who set up NAMA, then Fine Gael and Labour flogged off €40 billion worth of assets to these vulture and cuckoo funds that have wrecked the housing market and priced ordinary people out of it. It was Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and Labour in government who effectively stopped the social housing programme.

The Taoiseach says that the Government is building social housing. In four Dublin council areas last year, the first year of his Government, 239 local authority houses were built . That is all. There were 1,300 built in the entire country and that is when we have 70,000 to 80,000 families, hundreds of thousands of people, on the housing waiting lists. Then the Government refers to affordable housing as being homes costing €400,000 or €450,000. What planet is the Taoiseach living on?

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