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

The Minister and the Government know that our big concern and the concern of a lot of people out there is that affordable housing may turn out not to be affordable for the working people who desperately need it. People may not have heard it on the microphones, but across the Chamber just now the Minister, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, said that it will be. I have no doubt that the Minister hopes this will be the case, and that he would like it to be the case, but the Minister's wishes and the best intentions in the world do not make something true. I am sure that Enda Kenny probably meant it when he said in 2011, when the Fine Gael-Labour Party Government entered office, that by the end of its first term the Government would have eliminated homelessness. He probably actually wanted to get rid of homelessness, but in fact they made policy decisions that produced the worst homelessness crisis in the history of the State. One can call it unintended consequences or misguided ideology, but it means that what the Minister wants may not turn out to be the case.

In this legislation we want something that guarantees affordable housing that is actually affordable for the working families who are facing a housing crisis, because housing is not affordable. Key to this is that those people who make money from property, from land and from housing, who just like to make money from investment, and who do absolutely nothing, do not dictate the price of the affordable housing. That is our concern. We will get onto the details on that in some of the other amendments. We get very worried when we hear of public private partnerships where affordability is related to market price, even with a discount on market price, or to local market conditions, which is worse. Local market conditions are absolutely dysfunctional and market prices are absolutely stratospheric. If that is what affordability is benchmarked against, I suspect that quite a few of us believe that the affordable housing in many of the areas where it is needed most will not be affordable.

We want affordability to be hardwired into the legislation. It is critical that this is done on the issue of income. I believe affordability is based on one's income, as I have said to the Minister many times. It is not based on a particular price that is set by the market, the Minister or anybody else. It is based on income. What is a reasonable proportion of income for working people to have to spend on rent or on mortgage repayments? To my mind, that figure is 25% or maybe 30%, but no more. It is not 40%, 50% or 60%, or indeed 70%, as many people are paying who are at the epicentre of this housing crisis. We want this provision in the legislation. The Minister does not want it in the legislation. He has not put it in the legislation. Instead, it is to go back to regulation. That is a grave matter of concern. We want any decisions the Minister makes after this to be subject to scrutiny, and not just through information laid before the Dáil, considering that this week we are dealing with guillotine after guillotine. We are dizzy with the amount of legislation that is being rammed through. How would we possibly be able to spot what might be laid before the Dáil on a week like this? If there is a requirement that these things must be debated and passed in the Houses of the Oireachtas, we will have some insurance and some oversight against the possibility that decisions subsequently made by the Minister will not actually deliver the affordable housing we so desperately need. This is the logic of these amendments. I do not see why that basic level of oversight and accountability in this critically important area, which is the existential crisis facing a generation of our society, would not have the scrutiny it deserves.

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