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

Two years ago, the National Economic and Social Council produced a report in which it described Ireland’s housing sector as completely dysfunctional. It stated that this could be addressed by policy intervention by the Government and by structuring permanent affordability into the housing sector. Since then, the situation has got worse, not better. By the way, our housing costs are so far ahead of those of the rest of Europe, on average, that for the Taoiseach to suggest that this has to do with the Ukrainian war, or anything like it, is just ridiculous. It is part of the cost-of-living crisis, one of the biggest parts of it, and that is down to the Government’s policy failure, identified as recently as two years ago by the National Economic and Social Council.

One aspect of this is that because the Government refused to raise the income thresholds on eligibility for social housing and social housing support in those two years, thousands of people have lost their entitlement to social housing and social housing support and some of them are homeless. When will the Government raise those income threshold limits and restore the time that has been lost to the people on the housing list?

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