Joan Collins (Dublin South Central, Independents 4 Change) | Oireachtas source

Last week in Dublin City Council, there was a special meeting on O'Devaney Gardens. Councillors had the opportunity to withdraw from the rotten deal. The Labour Party, Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Green Party voted to maintain the deal. Bartra, the developer, was clearly in breach of the development agreement by not beginning construction within four weeks of the granting of planning permission. Planning permission was granted last September but Bartra chose to challenge it legally to ensure maximum profits. The site is a prime public city-centre site of 12 acres. Councillors gave it to a developer, committed to subsidising the infrastructure to the tune of €10 million and waived development levies of €5 million.

That is free land and €15 million. In exchange, Dublin City Council will buy 30% of the homes for public housing, 20% for affordable purchase and the other 50% will be sold privately, and, no doubt, the State will end up renting a significant number of these homes under HAP, rent allowance or long-term leasing. In the worst-case scenario, an approved housing body will buy the majority of private homes for a vastly inflated cost to house tenants in public housing on what was formerly public land. We simply could not make this up. It is ideological madness but no surprise as the same Government has now set up a scheme that plans to give developers more than €450 million - over €100,000 per unit - for simply doing their job and building homes.

I want to put on record that we were told strategic housing developments, SHDs, were imperative because we needed to build homes in the cities. On Davitt Road, 265 build-to-rent apartments have just been completed. It is an SHD and this is supposedly to build homes but 238 of these have been sold to Google and 27 will be allocated to Dublin City Council. The people in Drimnagh, where this was built, will not be able to access these one-bedroom and two-bedroom rental apartments. This shows the ideological madness of the Government.

I support the motion from Deputy Cian O'Callaghan. The Government's scheme is not about creating affordability for those on ordinary incomes. It is clear from this scheme that, at best, it will lock in the sky-high and unaffordable prices and, at worst, will drive up housing prices even further as developers will simply price in the subsidy. As was stated in the Dáil last Thursday, the scheme will provide nothing for people who want to purchase affordable homes. Instead, first-time buyers will still have to pay up to €600,000 for apartments and houses that will be sold at market prices.

This plan is fatally flawed. The €450 million is a direct subsidy for developers, which is insane. It is essentially the State taking on the risk for developers but the developers will be able to get all of the profit margin for these apartment developments. The Government is removing the risk for developers, it is removing everything that a developer is meant to do, so why does the Government not just become the developer? It is crazy. Every scheme that has been brought in has been geared towards developers making huge profit margins and the communities are left to scramble for what the Government is providing.

At the housing committee in April, Dublin City Council outlined a plan for the next five years. The total number of housing units to be built was 14,338, which includes long-term leasing, regeneration projects and advance planning and design acquisitions. That is in five years but there are 13,100 people and families on the housing list in Dublin City Council now and more than 5,000 HAP tenants looking to transfer. That is a total of 18,000 and we are talking about potentially building 14,300, despite all of the other tenants who will come onto the housing list in the coming years. This plan is incredibly destructive. We have enough publicly-zoned land controlled by the State, Dublin City Council, the other councils and NAMA to build 100,000 homes. That is what we need to do to solve the crisis.

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