Réada Cronin (Kildare North, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Leas-Cheann Comhairle for the opportunity to speak on this Private Members' motion. I thank the Minister for his speech.

"Affordable" and "housing" are two words that do not often seem to go together in the State. Nor will they while we have a government ideology that leaves housing, which is one of our most basic human needs, at the mercy of the markets. What a mercy the market is. According to The Irish Timesyesterday, house prices in Dublin have been surging by €1,500 per week since March. The bank of mammy and daddy, so beloved by the Minister's colleagues, would have to be a mega-bank to afford to keep up with those prices. For those who do not have the bank of mammy and daddy, the news is especially worrying, as it is for those who cannot manage to save anything and are barely hanging on after a year and a half of the Covid-19 pandemic. When people live from week to week or month to month and their salaries go straight out the door to pay for the rent or mortgage, food, the other basics of living and perhaps a take-away on a Friday night, there is not a whole lot left for trips, socialising, shopping or entertainment. They are at the pin of their collar. They are the pillars of our State, running to stand still and just about keeping going.

It is for these hard-working people that we need the 900 affordable homes in Poolbeg, which is what necessitated this motion. When it comes to their housing needs, they are ignored by Fine Gael, under whose tenure house prices increased by 88% nationally and 95% in Dublin. All of this was according to the plan of the former Minister, Mr. Michael Noonan. It was just what he had intended.

This is a Government that wants to shoo our young people, our best and brightest, into co-living - the new tenements, with bargain basement living standards at top dollar prices. Our hard-working adult children are shrinking their housing dreams to fit the profit need and greed of the favoured few. This is a Government that has given us tent cities cheek by jowl with penthouse living, believes in making housing a privilege and has not provided a single affordable home to buy or rent thus far. In 2011, the average rent across the State was €781 per month. In 2021, I know a woman in north Kildare who is paying €780 per month for a single room in a house, the bank having taken away the home on which she had spent a small fortune down the years in a mortgage. I am dealing with a stream of mortgage-approved young couples who cannot buy a home because they are being outbid at every turn. The cuckoos come and throw them out of their potential nests. Other couples in good jobs cannot even get mortgage approval.

All of this ruinous expense and ruinous experience is on the backs of our workers. It is cheap and vulgar. It degrades us as a society and diminishes us as a people. When people see their most basic need - the need for a home - left to the tyranny of the market, it tells them that they are less than, that they and their needs do not matter in the important business of the State. If housing its people, either through rent or purchase, is not important business for any state, then what is?

In north Kildare, I know many people who are hanging on by a thread because of housing. They are of all ages, from babies to the elderly, and they are all in crisis. The Minister should be in no doubt that there is a crisis. I am glad that he said that. For these people and the State, it is a humanitarian crisis of your making which we have to solve.

In your unguarded and unmanaged moments, the Minister's Government talks about public housing as free housing when it is no such thing. This demeaning and totally incorrect talk shows that you do not have a clue what you are talking about on public housing. You do not even know how it works. In public housing, everyone pays rent according to his or her means, but that you persist, and that your colleagues persist, in the myth of free housing shows your dislike and distrust of people who cannot afford to buy a home of their own. None of us knows how our own lives will turn out-----

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