Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputy Ó Broin for bringing forward this important motion relating to Poolbeg and the Irish Glass Bottle site. I am also glad that the Government has decided not to oppose the motion. I pay tribute to the Irish Glass Bottle Housing Action Group. I was an invited speaker at its launch meeting many years ago. I cannot remember how many years ago and that, in itself, tells a story because we still do not have any public and affordable housing on that site. The reason I was invited is that I face a similar situation in my constituency with Cherrywood, another massive development site where there is the same scandal. Not only is there the scandal with this site that there was a possible arrangement for NAMA to sell it to Dublin City Council, which did not happen for unexplained reasons, but the big scandal, as I have repeated many times here, is the fact that we had the biggest real estate company in the world in the form of NAMA, we had vast amounts of land and property with which we could have solved the housing crisis and we did precisely the wrong thing with it by handing it back to private developers and reinforcing the dynamics that had created the housing and homelessness crisis we are dealing with now. For me, that is the biggest scandal.

We had it in Cherrywood as well. Just as in Poolbeg and the Irish Glass Bottle Site, we have no clue, more than a decade later and with building taking place in Cherrywood, what price the affordable housing will be, and we have no clue how much affordable housing we will get on that site. Incidentally, the Minister's intervention to increase the 10% to 10% social and affordable will make no difference to Cherrywood.

Tens of millions of euro have gone into Cherrywood to build the roads, parks and the rest of the infrastructure. That was supposed to be conditional on the delivery of affordable housing. It is a telling indictment that after all that time and investment, we still have no clue what the price of the so-called affordable housing will be or how much affordable housing we will get on the site, which had previously been entirely in public ownership under NAMA. That is an absolute scandal.

As has been said, the timing of this motion is linked to a by-election. There is nothing wrong with that when an election should precisely be an opportunity to champion the issues and causes that will make a difference to the areas involved. I commend Deputy Ó Broin on doing this. Our candidate in that by-election is someone who will directly benefit if we can deliver some public and affordable housing, as she lives in Ringsend and her family are from Ringsend. She is a young worker in her early 20s on a modest income in an ordinary job. As she repeats endlessly on the campaign canvas, and she means it because it is the truth, she has no chance of ever being able to own her own house and very little chance, as is the case with most social housing applicants, of getting a council house this side of the next decade or more, as things stand.

It is urgent that we get housing development right at locations like those at Poolbeg and the Irish Glass Bottle site. It is also urgent that we try to rescue the situation in Cherrywood, one of the biggest residential developments in the country. Ronan Group Real Estate is also involved with that development. This should be a warning to the people of Ringsend and Irishtown because the guide prices being boasted about are in the region of €500,000 for three and four-bedroom houses. If those are going to be the sort of prices charged, it will be of no use to the ordinary working people of my area and will be of no use to people in Irishtown, Ringsend and surrounding areas.

I will put this really bluntly. I see no point in building houses of any description at that price. The only thing we should be doing with the land we can get hold of is delivering public and genuinely affordable housing. We should also be stating clearly what "affordable" actually means. We have put forward an amendment to this motion to state that affordability should be linked to income. Affordability is not a movable feast depending on which part of the city or country people live in. As I have said many times, gardaí, teachers and workers in retail on minimum wages are not paid higher wages because they live in Irishtown, Ringsend, Dún Laoghaire, Galway or Cork People but the costs of rent and house prices are far higher in those areas.

When the State refers to "affordable" housing, which we must deliver at scale, affordable must be affordable for everybody. There should be no discrimination based on what part of the country people are living in. This is the problem with the Government’s notions about affordability. It is not clearly set out in the Affordable Housing Bill 2021 how exactly the resulting housing provision will be affordable. The Land Development Agency Bill 2021 and the Affordable Housing Bill 2021 contain references to the market, market prices and discounts on market prices. That is no good. It is just no good and there should be no reference to those matters. The market is the problem and it is not able to deliver stuff that ordinary working people can afford.

Let us be absolutely clear. I do not know if the Minister will agree with this point and references to lobbyists, but the big property developers have no interest in the State being able to deliver affordable housing that is genuinely affordable for working people. The reason is that if the State builds and sells housing at €200,000 or €250,000 on any type of scale while a property developer is also trying to build similar houses and sell them for €400,000 or €500,000 a few hundred yards down the road, that private property developer, from his point of view, has a problem. He wants to profit and to be able to sell at those very high prices. Why on earth, then, would he want to see housing that is similar being built at scale and sold at half the price?

The lobbying from these people is about their self-interest and they must be written out of the picture when it comes to the State delivering public and affordable housing. I do not care about developers. Let them look after themselves on private land. Frankly, when they are sitting on private land or private property that they are hoarding, speculating on and manipulating the market with, I would take it from them. The problem is that they own too much of the land and they are dictating market prices and rents and now they are trying to move in on the public land bank via the Land Development Agency.

I support the motion and I am glad the Minister of State is not going to oppose it. I have been campaigning and supporting the campaign to get public and affordable housing on the site since it started. It is a sad indictment that we still do not know whether the housing will be affordable. It is a scandal that people like Mr. Ronan ever got hold of such large portions of that land. We need affordability to be based on people’s incomes. To my mind, as our amendment suggests, that should mean that people should not have to spend more than 25% of their income on putting a roof over their head. Do we work to live or do we live to work? People paying 40%, 50%, 60% or 70% of their income on just putting a roof over their heads - if they are even able to get a roof over their heads - are living to work and not working to live. They are slaves to extortionate house prices and rents. We must end that scandalous situation by delivering genuinely affordable housing for working people.

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