Matt Carthy (Cavan-Monaghan, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Record house prices, record rent costs, record and growing levels of homelessness and the lowest home ownership rates in Ireland for generations; whatever spin the Minister wants to put on it, that is the legacy of Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil housing policies in action. Not content with creating a financial crash precipitated by a property bubble, they somehow managed to emerge from that crash with a housing crisis which, in turn, has become a housing emergency. This was not an accident. It happened because of a concerted strategy to make homes a commodity, to move away from the building and purchasing of houses by local authorities to a reliance on the private sector and a demonisation of those who need housing support.

I have told the story previously of how, in 1990, my own family's lives were changed forever and for the better when we were allocated a council house. We did not get a free house - nobody did. Council tenants paid rent relative to their income and if circumstances changed, they purchased their home with a discount based on the number of years they were renting. The funds from that purchase could then be used by the council to purchase another home. It was a system that worked. It created vibrant communities and a positive housing market. Those who could purchase their own homes privately could do so at affordable rates and those who needed to rent could do so without seeing their entire income eaten away.

I still recall that moment in the early 2000s when, as a local councillor, I contacted my town clerk to inform them that a house in the estate I grew up in was up for sale. Up until that point, that house would immediately have been bought by the council but in this instance, the Department responsible for housing, under a Fianna Fáil Minister, refused the council permission to purchase and the house was purchased by a private landlord. In the years since, the State has paid, via rent subsidies, many multiples of the cost that would have been involved in buying the house in the first place.

The Government provided free houses all right, but it provided them to private vested interests. The premise of this scandalous strategy remains. Dismally low income limits prevent working families from accessing any housing supports. So-called affordable housing is not affordable. In counties like Monaghan, the Government is not even pretending to provide it. Even if the Government reached any of its pathetic targets, we would still expect tens of thousands of people to remain locked into the private rental market. The solution, in a nutshell, is to build public homes. It is the only solution but this Government does not seem to have the political capacity to deliver it.

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