Duncan Smith (Dublin Fingal, Labour) | Oireachtas source

In response to Deputy Ó Murchú, that will not happen. There has been no listening to the Opposition on this or any other issue. I thank Deputy Cian O'Callaghan for yet another very good motion on housing.

It is incredible what the Government is doing here. Last year, we interrogated and tried to highlight as best we possibly could the problems with the shared equity scheme and how it would inflate prices. We cited the Economic and Social Research Institute, ESRI, and international practice of how this was a poor scheme. We highlighted the problems with the help-to-buy scheme and how that inflated prices.

It is almost as if the Government has decided it will do something that is so big, grand, brazen and fantastical, in terms of transferring taxpayers' money directly to developers, that the media, the Opposition and the public will not latch on to it. That is what I believe is being done. This is the most quintessential Fianna Fáil policy we have seen since the halcyon days of the so-called Celtic tiger Government.

I speak on this debate at a time when my advice clinics in Fingal are crippled with people in housing distress. I have been doing advice clinics for eight years and they have been about housing, housing, housing. During Covid, given the ban on evictions, there was a slight pause in the intensity of the housing representations. That is now gone and people are attending in huge numbers, in massive distress. On a glorious Saturday morning in Swords, with the sound of a wedding in the church next to me, I had a man come to my clinic on behalf of his family who was in floods of tears and facing eviction. It was one of the most heartbreaking juxtaposition of what was happening outside compared with what was happening in the Brackenstown adult scene of education, BASE, community centre in Swords. This is happening in all our clinics. I am disappointed that the Minister is not here because it happened in his constituency.

The Government must know that this measure will not solve the housing crisis. It will not do anything for cost rental. It will not do anything to increase affordable or local authority supply. This measure will only increase the bank balances and income streams of the developers, who are back where they were in the 1990s and early 2000s. They are in total control of the housing market and supply. They are calling the shots. It is not new developers. It is the same developers in the same areas on the same plots of land that were under the microscope for years and they are now being activated through the last of the strategic housing developments, SHDs, and future planning permissions. All the tracks are being put in place to ensure that the very elite will have good times ahead while the majority of people in this country, be they young or old, families, divorced or separated, people with disabilities - the list goes on - face numerous obstacles, many of which are insurmountable, to get secure housing, be it through local authorities, cost rental or via their own purchase.

From what has been reported in the media, it is not clear whether there is a clawback mechanism built into these new grants for developers. It is clearly vital to ensure that public money is spent wisely and is not simply bumping up developers' profits. The fact that there is no clarity on this tell us that there is none, that this is not being spent wisely, and that this could be the most unwise spending of money we have seen by this Government.

We have mentioned the shared equity scheme and the help-to-buy scheme, which seem to be the appetiser to this absolute monstrosity being put forward by the Government. Any grant given to anyone to build any type of home should be given on the condition that those homes would be truly affordable to the average worker, people with disabilities, and young, old or separated people, as well as those on the edge.

It was said that there have been numerous failures. I must come back to a number of points raised in the debate earlier. Deputy Gannon mentioned Deputy Kelly when he was Minister, in the context of apartment sizes. Deputy Gannon then said that we need to call for rent freezer, we know they can be done. We know they can be done because Deputy Kelly, in his 19 months as a Minister, having taken over from three years of absolute inactivity by Phil Hogan on housing, delivered two rent freezes. Deputy Ó Broin mentioned Deputy Kelly as well.

During my time on the council, when Deputy Kelly became Minister, we actually saw Part 8 developments come through. We saw direct local authority builds in councils that were able to do them and had resources, such as Fingal. Racecourse Common in Lusk came through, as did Darcystown, Balrothery; Rolestown and Holymount, Swords; Pinewood Green in Balbriggan; and the Grange in Ballyboughal. These were 2015 Part 8 developments. They were not targets. They were not commencement notices or planning permissions. These are real homes delivered by a local authority. It took them a while to deliver them but they were commenced under Labour leadership.

When the Labour Party left office and when Eoghan Murphy took over, there was a shift in policy. It was a case of going with HAP; which would be the be-all and end-all. What should have been a transitional payment from the rent allowance poverty trap scandal towards a wider scheme of public delivery of housing, between 2016 and 2020, became the squandered years of public housing delivery due to the policy shift towards HAP. Now what do we have? We have a relatively stable economy that is now being geared in a high-powered overdrive fashion back towards developers. We are back to square one. It is even worse. It has never been this bad.

We have never had so many people excluded from housing. We have never had so many people who are about to be evicted, who are in homelessness or who are unable to afford to buy or rent. All we have is spin and a housing market that is solely reliant on developers. That is the bottom line. Our local authorities that were hollowed out in the 1990s and the early 2000s remain hollowed out. They do not have the resources. If we go into any local authority and try to do a head count of people who are able to deliver housing, they are not there, because successive Governments and Ministers have not done that.

See this speech in context