Aengus Ó Snodaigh (Dublin South Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

It is €50,000. We are still not reaching that minimal figure. The Deputy's argument is right but there is also another argument. A colleague of Deputy O'Donnell in government, Deputy Ó Cuív, said there should not be a threshold and that people should be allowed to be on the social housing list if they want to be on it.

Those who want to be on it would be on it, and those who want to be on the affordable housing list would be on the same list but they would be able to afford to purchase the property if that was their wish. There would be differential rent. There is a way of dealing with this, but we have made a basket case of it in this country. I refer to those who are lucky enough to have a job, such as a general operative in a council. If he or she is married and both of them are working, they are off the list. That is absolute madness. That is because the threshold imposed never grew. If it was right in the first place, it would have been indexed linked. One of the problems with the thresholds of the HAP scheme, and rental allowance before that, is that it was chasing the figures that were being set by the industry and chasing a reduced number of properties.

The Minister was correct when he said we need more houses. Everyone in the Chamber agrees with that but we need them now. We need them built quickly. We also need to stop institutions competing against young couples who have an income. In part of the constituency that I and Deputy Joan Collins represent, there are old Dublin City Council properties. They are concrete houses that are not going to fall down but they are not plush houses and do not have huge amounts of land. They are selling for €400,000. The people who grew up in those estates and were born in those houses cannot afford them. They are being forced outside the city and, once again, as happened during the Celtic tiger years, they are being forced out of their own areas where they grew up and went to school. There is no possibility of them affording or renting them. The cost to rent a house in Ballyfermot on Decies Road, a road on which I lived not long ago, is €2,500. It is absolute madness for any society to allow that amount of rent to be demanded for a house. A house next door is being sold for nearly €300,000, which is again absolute madness. We have to get to grips with this.

More houses must be built but we also have to be realistic that the threshold for social housing is too low. Deputy Ó Cuív and others made the point that if we want a social mix in our communities, we are not going to get it if we force working people out of those communities. Youth workers living in Ballyfermot will not be on the social housing list nor will they be able to afford a house there because their wages are not high enough. That is why an open-ended list would work, as it works in other countries. We still have not got to the stage where the leases for properties are 20, 30 or 40 years long, as they are on the Continent. We should start approaching that and imposing rent limits, as well as rents that are fixed over a period of time. We are way behind where we should be. While the action being taken on income thresholds in Dublin, which come into effect in January, are welcome, it is a small step. It is not going to make a huge bit of difference to a lot of people who have been forced off the list, have lost their time on record and, reluctantly, have to start the process all over again.

I thank everybody for their help during the year. Bíodh Nollaig Shona agus séasúr maith agaibh ar fad, agus bíodh sos ag an bhfoireann agus ag na Comhaltaí.

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