Gerald Nash (Louth, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I agree with the Minister of State that honesty and truth would be very welcome, and from the Opposition as well. Many of the lazy contributions we heard this morning remind me of the lads who have never kicked a ball in their lives who roar at the top of their voices at the telly telling the Irish intentional team how to play football. Most of them have never togged out. In fact, the idea they would ever tog out for Government would bring them out in a cold sweat. They should put on the boots, wear the jersey and come back to us.

I missed Deputy Ó Broin’s contribution earlier but I am informed it was reliably and predictably enough a load of old guff. I will not take a history lesson from a party which would like us to air-brush its recent horrific past. Sinn Féin is completely untested in this jurisdiction but where it is tested the youth homelessness statistics speak for themselves. Northern Ireland is no utopia when it comes to the housing issue. Sinn Féin cannot say one thing in Dundalk and do an entirely different thing in Derry. That is partitionism par excellence. The part-time progressives in Sinn Féin really ought to drop the partitionist act.

Why can we not get housing right in this country? It is because of the crushing financialisation of housing, the fetishisation of land ownership and the rewarding of speculation. I am a generation away from the corporation house. I can say the same for practically all of my Labour Party Oireachtas colleagues. My parents benefited from the great schemes of well-designed homes built in towns like Drogheda when the State was only 20 or 30 years in existence. When they married in the early 1970s, an unskilled factory worker and a confectioner, they could afford to buy a modest three-bedroomed home for the family they planned to have, safe in the knowledge that come what may they would be able to pay the mortgage. In 2021, a hardworking couple of modest means does not stand a chance. The option of a decent home built by the local authority in my area is ten years away and a fortune in taxpayers’ money wasted on the housing assistance payment, HAP, scheme.

Housing and speculation as a source of enrichment for a small few at the expense of the common good began under a business and political culture made by the previous generation in Fianna Fáil. The younger citizens of today’s Ireland are the longest suffering victims of a financial crash that was the logical result of an economy based on the hope that people would endlessly keep selling homes to each other at ever inflating prices.

This Ponzi scheme and the lax regulation and greed which let it happen wreaked havoc. From 2011 to 2015, there was little money to do anything apart from staying afloat. This point is deliberately ignored by some and conveniently so. When more resources became available, Fine Gael Ministers were ideologically incapable of seeing the scale of the problem and fixing it by finally tackling extortionate land costs, building more public and affordable homes and properly managing rents in a fair manner. Instead of moving heaven and earth to provide the homes we need, they spent almost 600% more on the housing assistance payment, HAP, in 2019 than in 2016. What a manifest waste of money.

Until now, Fianna Fáil's signature intervention was an enhanced help to buy scheme - same old Fianna Fáil, never learning - another waste of taxpayer's money with developers factoring the terms of the scheme into their price and prices are driven up with a policy which has been shown to benefit disproportionately those who already have the price of a deposit. This is economic illiteracy at its worst. The Labour Party's Bill, if the Government decides to accept it and which it is kicking to touch, would be a critical piece of the jigsaw in terms of housing supply.

By supporting this key legislation, the Government would be sending out a message that this Government has learned. It would signal it has finally learned the financialisation of the housing market must end and speculation must come a distant second place to the common good and the public interest. The calculation both Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil have always made is that once house prices keep rising, the voters will be happy. However, the world has changed and Ireland is changing.

If the Minister of State does not want to listen to younger people and their families, he should listen to IBEC and the American Chamber of Commerce, which are hardly radical, left-wing organisations. They have a similar view on housing and the infrastructural deficit as we have in the Labour Party. They know we face a massive challenge and radical solutions need to be provided. If the Minister of State is not minded to listen to us or the younger citizens waiting for homes, while trapped in homes and often still living with their families into their 30s and 40s with little prospect of getting out, he should listen to IBEC, the American Chamber of Commerce and others.

Nowhere is the gap and difficulties younger people have, in terms of them being a generation which will be less well-off than their parents, better expressed than in terms of access to affordable, sustainable and secure housing. This is part of the solution and I am disappointed this Government is failing to acknowledge that by adopting this legislation now and is kicking the can further down the road.

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