Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I have had the advantage of listening to the entire debate today and I feel I am swimming in mud. There have been wonderful words about affordable housing and cost-rental housing and all that type of language. I have read about the subject and listened to what was said today and I can only repeat that it is like swimming in mud trying to understood all of it. Then I stood back and wondered why that should be the case when this Bill is being described as transformative legislation.

I am looking and what is missing here is a failure to recognise that this Government and previous Governments have treated housing and homes as commodities. It would be bad enough if that was all that they did but their policies actively encouraged the treatment of housing or a home as a commodity.

From 2009 construction stopped in Galway. I do not wish to be parochial but it needs to be put in context. Why did it stop? Ostensibly it stopped because of the financial crisis, but it never resumed. Not alone did it stop and was not resumed but parallel to that we introduced different schemes that actively ensured the private market would be kept floating when it was in trouble and when prices should have continued to tumble. We set up the housing assistance payment and told those on the waiting list it was the only game in town. We took them off the waiting list and put them into private houses with absolutely no security of tenure. We added to that repeatedly with various schemes. The figure of more than €3 billion has been boasted about as the highest amount of money ever to go into housing when almost half of that is going into the private landlord sector. Again, just to pre-empt any comments, I believe we need private landlords. They are absolutely part of the solution to the housing crisis but the other major part is the role of the State in stepping in and giving a strong message that we believe a home is absolutely the most basic ingredient of a civilised society. Without a home, without security of tenure, a person can say goodbye to taking part in a democracy. We, as a country, through our Governments, have completely and repeatedly undermined that.

I will take a little look at Galway, very quickly. The daft.iequarter 1 2021 rental report showed the average monthly rental price in Galway was €1,400. I know for a fact it is much higher than that; it is €2,000 for a three-bedroom house in the area where I live. There was a rise of 6.7% in Galway in that first quarter. The prices for the year show the increase was 11.9%. We will go back to HAP, which I mention repeatedly. The Simon Community does a snapshot report every quarter called Locked Out of the Market. There were two properties in Galway city and two properties in the suburbs that were within the standard discretionary HAP limits. The House should remember we are giving out €1.4 billion, which I am told is the cumulative figure, and it is rising. HAP is the only game in town and there are two properties available under it.

Where do I go with this legislation, which I have read, and the explanatory memorandum, which I have read too, and also the digest? The digest was produced back in April and my note tells me the Oireachtas Library and Research Service was unable to provide a full digest on the final legislation due to the short time of two working days between publication of the Bill and the scheduled Second Stage debate in the Seanad. I thank the service for its briefing. My colleague, Deputy Pringle, has already referred to it. It is an excellent document and highlights 15 issues going back to when the heads of the Bill were published. Not one of those issues has been addressed satisfactorily, to my knowledge. I almost want to give up in relation to this because we get tied up with words and propaganda and lose the trend and the thread of what has happened here.

We must go back and declare a "housing crisis", a term which I see the Minister is finally using in his speech. I was elected for the first time in February 2016 and am acutely conscious of the privilege. Before that my colleagues, Deputy Pringle, former Deputy, Clare Daly, and so on fought bravely and continue to do so to say we have a housing crisis. Why do we have crisis? It is because we need to change Government policy. How do we change Government policy? We do so by pushing and pushing each Government to do that. Thus we finally have a recognition here by the Minister, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, that we have a crisis. He talked about it at the beginning and the end of his speech and in between he forgets to tell us it was caused by the Government and the previous Government. He fails to explain why he has not complied with the programme for Government, which commits to holding a referendum. He fails to explain that in a reply this morning he told us it was now going to a commission to review that commitment to put it into the Constitution. By the time we enshrine it in the Constitution we will have no public land left because this Bill, along with the Land Development Agency Bill, is planning to use the one asset we have, our public land, which is an integral part of the solution. Instead of that we are giving the thumbs-up to the Land Development Agency which is being set up under statute now but which has failed to do the job it was set up to do, namely, to do an audit of all public land and give us a report. It has not done that and now we are backing that up with an Affordable Housing Bill that is going to have housing that is anything but affordable. Why is that? It is because the Government is still taking its mark from the market and not from what people earn in this country and what the cost of a house is. I am looking at the digest and from that I see the Central Statistics Office states the median average earnings are €36,000. I repeat, the median figure is €36,000. We should then look at the cost of the house and ask how we build houses and provide houses for our people that allow a person in that earnings bracket to either rent a house or to buy one. How do we do that? We do it by being honest and by changing Government policy.

There is an inbuilt snobbery in all the policy coming forward from the Government as it assumes we all want to own a house. We do not. We want choices. We want a choice to buy a house if we can afford it and we want a choice to rent a house for life with security of tenure. The best way to give a house for life is for the State to build houses. I used the words "public housing on public land". I do not mind if it is cost rental or any of that language. I do not mind if it is cost rental, where the rent is related only to costs of building the house but not profit and if it is built on public land to remain on public land forever. There is absolutely no guarantee in any of this that the cost rental will not be sold off in the future. There is absolutely no guarantee of security of tenure. The Minister of State is sitting here telling us this is an affordable housing strategy that will transform. It certainly will do that. It certainly will transform our public space such that it is not public space any more, not public land.

I am looking at this and wondering, in the minute I have left, what else I can say. What else can colleagues do to get behind all this propaganda and say a home is an essential unit for everyone whether it is rented for life or purchased? A home is the most basic thing to have so we can participate and take part in society. I am so tired of the propaganda and the twisting of language. That twisting of language has led to there being absolutely no confidence in the democratic system or in the Government. That for me is the worst thing that has happened. People are losing respect for the Government and for language and believe we are all the same and that we are all in it for our own gain, and that is not accurate. There are many good people on this side of the House who have repeatedly stood up and lost votes by standing up saying this is not the way to do it. I have five seconds left. I am not going to make a difference at this stage except to place on the record that this is going to make the problem worse rather than better.

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