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

The misguided and ill-fated Rebuilding Ireland programme to solve the housing crisis put forward by Fine Gael and Labour projected 87,000 HAP, RAS and leasing tenancies. It was a disastrous plan which has left us reliant on vulture funds and so on to deliver housing. Of course, they have not delivered. That is not their job. Their job is to make money and charge extortionate rents. That target was bad enough but does the Taoiseach know what we up to now in terms of HAP, RAS and leasing tenancies? The number is 91,000, not including some of the approved housing body, AHB, leasing. It is probably around 100,000.

That is even higher than the mad target set under Rebuilding Ireland, completely reliant on vulture funds, corporate landlords and so forth.

Of course, one cannot pull the rug on all of that immediately. We are not suggesting that. We are saying that the Government's targets are not ambitious enough. The Government's target is for 12,000. By the way, last year local authorities and AHBs only built or purchased just over 4,000 - they did not build them all - and the target for next year is 12,000. Even the Economic and Social Research Institute, ESRI, says that is not enough and that the Government needs to double the expenditure to get the figure up to about 19,000. We would say to go a bit further, but it is in the right ballpark. The Government is not committing to it and we hear that there is a row in the Cabinet about the expenditure levels. The problem is that the Government is not putting the resources forward and is not having the targets delivered. In the meantime, it could impose rent controls and stop no-fault or economic evictions which are putting people into homelessness.

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