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

Planning permissions are not the issue in the housing crisis. We have 80,000 planning permissions granted at the moment. The problem is that those in the private sector has no interest in solving this crisis. Why would it when it can command record house prices and record rents? It has a vested interest in not solving the crisis because if there was lots of cheap accommodation it could not make such big profits. The Minister claims, against that background where the State has to intervene, with catastrophic market failure causing human misery for tens of thousands of people affected by this housing crisis, that public housing is ramping up. I just gave him the facts. In the first six months of 2022, in the teeth of this crisis, the four Dublin local authorities built no new council houses. The Government has failed to spend €700 million that was allocated for housing. What is the Government going to do about that? What is it going to do to ramp up the construction of local authority housing? What is it going to do with that €700 million? Will it, for example, purchase multi-unit complexes like Tathony House, St. Helen's Court, the buildings on Rathmines Road Lower, or other places where people face eviction?

Will it stop evictions happening while we face this emergency?

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