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

We will debate the detail of Housing for All another day. I am a member of the Committee on Budgetary Oversight. According to the Parliamentary Budget Office, there will not be €4 billion of Government expenditure on Housing for All. There will be about €2.5 billion of direct Exchequer funding and the Government is essentially hoping to get the rest from the private sector. I will leave that for another day.

My point is that the reason we have a housing crisis in general, and specifically a student accommodation crisis, is that what is being built is for profit and it is unaffordable. This city is littered with new developments of highly expensive, unaffordable, private investor-built, student accommodation costing €1,000 or more a month.

It is also littered with new hotels which are now being rented to students who cannot find affordable accommodation. Does the Taoiseach know how many additional hotel rooms will be built, which are in the planning system, over the next while? It is 18,000 new hotel rooms. In this city between now and 2023, some 24 new hotels will be built - we have already had many new hotels built - with another 4,500 rooms. All that building capacity is going into building stuff for profit, but not going into building the affordable student accommodation we actually need. Now that disease is spreading onto the college campuses, with UCD building student accommodation for €14,000 a year, which is completely unaffordable, what is the Government going to do about it?

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