Mary Lou McDonald (Dublin Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The National Economic and Social Council's view is that Ireland must evolve from a speculative and highly cyclical system to a permanently affordable, stable and more sustainable system of housing. The council’s recommended actions to deliver change in the area of housing are concerned with bridging the supply gap by actively managing land for the public good and the affordability gap by engineering in permanent affordability. This is important work and the Taoiseach’s Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage, Deputy Darragh O’Brien, could do well to pay more attention to it.

Two things struck me in recent times as I listened to the Taoiseach and his colleagues attempt to defend their record on housing. The first thing is that the Taoiseach presents the housing crisis as though it was a relatively new phenomenon. Of course, this narrative suits him. He would like us to forget that he was a member of the Fianna Fáil Cabinet which squandered the economic boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s, which was funded largely at the time by European structural funds as the Taoiseach will recall. He would also like us to forget that it was Fianna Fáil that nurtured the speculative and highly cyclical system of housing supply in Ireland that concerns the NESC so much. It was Fine Gael, of course, that doubled down on that strategy.

The facts and evidence now speak for themselves. The cost of renting has now nearly doubled in Dublin over the last decade and home ownership at the age of 30 has halved in the space of a generation. As the lead author of a study from the Economic and Social Research Institute, ESRI, stated this week, "each successive generation [is now] less likely" than the last one to own their own homes by that age. That is the record of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael in government. Despite the Government's petty sound bites, the truth is that Sinn Féin's analysis and our solutions, be they in legislation or policy, reflect the fundamental and transformative change to Ireland's policy that NESC, the ESRI and so many others, but especially the young, are now crying out for.

Therefore, I urge the Taoiseach to study the deliberations from NESC, the ESRI and all the other experts in the field and to listen to the voices of the generation locked out of home ownership, many of whom are falling into homelessness and "Generation Rent", as they are called. I also urge the Taoiseach to replace the kind of sound bite hostility and the almost glib attitude that he adopts, and instead work for the kind of fundamental transformation we need. I am urging him to do this because in the absence of that transformation we will be in this housing crisis for a very long time and that is simply not tolerable.

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