Gerald Nash (Louth, Labour) | Oireachtas source

Housing is the foundation on which a decent and functioning society is built. Precarious housing leads to precarious lives. For this and the previous Fianna Fáil supported Government's abject failure on housing, the citizens of Ireland and our society and economy will pay a severe price. I do not want to be flippant or in any way dismissive given the seriousness of the crisis we now face but, quite frankly, I have more faith and confidence in Santa Claus than I do in the Government to fix the housing crisis.

The housing catastrophe we are experiencing is on Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. We have seen seven years of wasted prosperity and two failed plans to build the private, public, voluntary and affordable homes we need. We have a rental market in chaos. Home ownership is beyond the grasp of many people who are educated, skilled and work hard for a living. Funds are competing with first-time buyers and councils, soaking up good homes off the plans. To our eternal shame, this Christmas 11,000 people, including children, are paying the ultimate price. They are homeless.

By any objective measurement, the Minister's plan is failing. In any job, the basic metric should be whether things are going better than when the person first took on the job. They manifestly are not. They are, in fact, getting worse. Unfortunately, the Minister holds some records, not the kind he is likely to pin to the wall. We have the highest rents ever recorded. We have the record for the highest house prices and the highest numbers of people who are homeless. In life and in business, when one is in a job and the plan is not working, one either steps down or changes the plan. One has the humility to change the plan. The Minister is prepared to do neither. For that, this Government will pay a heavy price.

These are not just political charges that we expect to see in the Chamber in the course of our business. Rather, it is the harsh, cold truth. The truth is that the numbers are only going in one direction. The Minister of State, Deputy Butler, referenced Waterford earlier and did so selectively. In Louth the reality is that house prices have gone up by 7% in the past year. There is planning permission in place for 11,000 new homes, but only 1,282 are still under construction or expected to be completed this year. In 2020, at the height of the pandemic and before the Minister's plan, there were 1,076 completions. That was before Housing for All, yet we still say that Housing for All is a success. Just over 10% of all permissions in place and a fraction of what is needed to house people is being built this year. There have been 41% fewer permissions granted across Ireland in the third quarter of this year than in the same period of 2021. They are not my figures; they are figures from the CSO.

Rents are up 13%, if people can find a place at all. The reality for the people I represent is ten to 12 years on the housing list. That is the reality of life in Louth and the lived experience for too many across the country in 2022. Yet, the Government still sticks to a plan that is not working, indifferent to all of the warning signs from the Opposition and independent experts.

Housing for All has many of the fundamental design flaws of Fine Gael's Rebuilding Ireland, a plan that Fianna Fáil, in terms of confidence and supply, supported. There was a massive over-reliance on private developers to solve a problem that only the State has the scale, authority, mandate, capacity and resources ultimately to crack. Even as developers, in particular apartment developers, make it clear that they do not have the finance and are getting out of the game, the Government still sticks to its Housing for All plans and metrics and fails to change tack fundamentally to wrap up what we need to do, namely build social and affordable homes on publicly owned land by local authorities.

When supply in the private market slows, the Government looks for scapegoats. That is what is happening. Residents' associations are using their constitutional right to take a judicial review, for example, a right Government now wants to deprive certain citizens and bodies of. There is a rush to reform - I use that term advisedly - An Bord Pleanála, a body badly in need of reform but not in the rushed way the Government plans. The Government wants to limit Part 8 powers for local authority members and local authorities more generally. This sounds to me like a solution in search of a problem, if I ever saw one. We all saw this coming. We knew that putting most of our eggs in the private sector basket was a Hail Mary strategy. That is why the Labour Party, in our costed budget launched last September, said that we should spend an extra €1.5 billion on public housing next year and scale up its ambition on cost rental. The truth is that anything positive and progressive the Minister might have done on his watch in terms of housing was done because he had to be carried, kicking screaming, and led by the Opposition to do it.

I refer to the winter eviction ban, something the Government simply refused to introduce. It was dragged kicking and screaming to introduce it this year. It introduced an increase to the income threshold for social housing, restrictions on AirBnBs and the tenant in situscheme, which has worked well, where it has worked, for HAP tenants who are at risk of homelessness and landlords who are selling up. The Government increased stamp duty on buying multiple units in housing developments.

In all of those circumstances, the Minister and his ministerial colleagues had to be dragged kicking and screaming by the Opposition to do the right, practical, pragmatic and constructive thing. We in the Labour Party are doing our best to be constructive with the Minister, but he is sometimes making that very difficult. It is his policy that we have a problem with, not him.

The Minister will survive today's vote because the Government has the numbers and this is a numbers game. However, the plan should not survive this vote. The very least the Minister should do is have the humility to change his plan. It is a plan that is not working. He should listen to the constructive proposals being provided by the Opposition today. The Minister must change his plan.

See this speech in context