Aodhán Ó Ríordáin (Dublin Bay North, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I, too, am disappointed with the response of the Minister of State. Ireland has had a dysfunctional relationship with property and housing for many years and it is making a great many people utterly miserable. Highly disproportionate amounts of people's incomes are shovelled into mortgage repayments and rents every month. That money could be spent on their families, on life and on connectivity with other human beings. Instead, we have all been sucked into the race to believe we have to chain ourselves to a mortgage for 30 or 40 years and spend a vast and disproportionate percentage of our income on servicing that mortgage. We are led to believe we have to spend vast amounts on rent to survive.

For years, we have handed the entire housing game to the private sector. This leads to people trying to make a quick buck. That leads, in turn, to issues like those we have seen this week in Donegal, Mayo and throughout the country, as well as issues in my constituency of cowboy developers building apartment blocks that are not fit for purpose. Ten, 15 or 20 years later these issues then come to the fore.

We have people who are utterly miserable. The belief system is that this is the way it must be. People take the view that they must get on the ladder. This is a legacy issue. It is part of our cultural mentality that this is the way it should be. We convince people that they need to build their castle. Once a person builds the castle and is spending all that money on it and investing blood, sweat and tears in a mortgage, he or she will defend that castle. This leads to a lack of social cohesion. What happens is that people, in what is in many circumstances an understandable attempt to defend their castle, cannot look beyond it. Thus, the social cohesion needed within the wider community is lost. There will be objections to HSE facilities, social housing in the community, halting sites and other local developments because we have convinced everyone that they need to get a castle and plough money into it. Even though this is making people miserable, they believe they must defend it.

We cannot change the Irish psyche overnight. We understand the need for security and to have a home and live and raise a family in it. However, there has to come a point when we realise that we are in a cycle of misery.

We come back again and again to the issue of housing. It has collapsed Governments and almost collapsed our country ten years ago. It has brought the political system into disrepute. There have been tribunals. Why? They came about because of bribes. Why? They arose from housing, developers, dirty politics and brown envelopes. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael were up to their necks in it. There comes a point where we have to stop, change and believe we can do better. We have to understand that there is potential for a better way which the entire country can buy in to so that we do not have to be forever on the misery wheel. We may think it is making us happy but it is actually making us desperately unhappy. Think of all the money we could be spending on our children and families and on our lives.

The Kenny report spelled it out in 1974, which was before I was born. The suggestion was made that the Bill is pre-empting policy or is somehow previous. To be honest, we cannot take that comment seriously. Then it was suggested that we should delay Second Stage for 12 months. As my colleague, Deputy Sean Sherlock, said, that shows the Government does not understand the seriousness of the situation.

If we are serious about housing, if we realise how immense this issue is for young people who are locked out of the housing market, for the generations of people who are living in the same home, for people spending money on rent which they cannot afford and for the country being done in by dodgy developers, then this is the type of Bill that the Government should definitely support, and support today and not in 12 months time.

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