John Lahart (Dublin South West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister and wish him well with the Bill. I echo what my constituency colleague, Deputy Duffy, said about the programme for Government.

I have a couple of questions. I welcome the affordable rent aspect and the security of tenure it provides. If someone who avails of it moves into retirement phase, his or her income will drop substantially. The Vienna model and other continental models take account of this, and the Minister has made proposals concerning the availability of housing assistance payment, HAP, for people who lose their jobs, but what about people who enter their retirement years?

I welcome what the Minister is doing in respect of SHDs. In my constituency, what I predicted would happen has happened. The damage has been done, but some of it could be undone. There are planning applications for 13-storey SHDs in Citywest close to the village of Saggart. That is just two storeys shy of Liberty Hall. There is another application for a nine-storey SHD. The impact of the famous Cosgrave SHD could have been mitigated if it had not all been build to rent. Quite a number of older people in my community have considered the opportunity to trade down and move 100 yd or 500 yd. They have wondered whether that site would offer them the opportunity, but it does not because it is all build to rent. That is a savage legacy of the previous Government that will live with us for a long time. As such, I welcome the end of the SHD process, but the Minister and I know that it has done a great deal of damage.

Comments have been made in recent days about investment funds and certain apartments and other housing units that will be offered for public or social housing. I will quote Dr. Mike Ryan, who has been quoted many times over the past year in a different context. He had a great phrase: "Perfection is the enemy of the good". The perfect in the minds of all Fianna Fáil Members is that we build public housing on public land. That is our objective, but you cannot turn a supertanker around in 24 hours. That is what previous housing policy was, and trying to reverse it and put it on the right course takes time. Everything cannot be perfect, but the provision of 2,500 social housing units virtually at the click of a finger in the foreseeable future cannot be denied as being a public good. It is not perfect, but it is certainly a public good.

I want to focus on what we are doing rather than on the Opposition, but I once heard a great definition of a socialist as someone who has nothing and wants to share it with everybody. That has struck me as being at the heart of some of the most strident opposition to the constructive, dynamic, positive and practical housing policies that have emerged from the Government over the past year. It should be a guiding principle for the foreseeable future that we should not always let the perfect get in the way of doing good. We want to get to the point of building public housing on public land. That is the clear stated intention of the Government and the affordable housing model is an essential part of that. Based on my conversations with the Minister and his team over recent months, the imminent housing for all policy will probably be as radical as it can get.

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