Ivana Bacik (Dublin Bay South, Labour) | Oireachtas source

My Labour Party colleagues and I have come from the funeral in Blackrock of our dear friend and colleague, the pioneering former Minister for Education, Niamh Bhreathnach. I acknowledge the presence at the funeral of not only the President but also a representative of the Taoiseach; the Minister, Deputy Foley; the Minister of State, Deputy Carroll MacNeill; and Deputy Devlin. I express on my behalf and that of the Labour Party our appreciation for that and we send our sincere thoughts, condolences and sympathies to Tom, Cliodhna, Macdara and all of Niamh’s friends and wider community. She has left a tremendous legacy and while we will have the opportunity to speak further on that at another date, I wanted to acknowledge it today.

In the past 24 hours, my office has heard from several individuals who have languished on the housing list for years wondering when, if ever, they will have somewhere to call home. We have heard from a constituent facing an imminent and illegal eviction who cannot get a response from the Residential Tenancies Board, from an employee forced to commute six hours per day from Mayo to Dublin due to the lack of affordable housing here and from a homelessness case worker who is re-evaluating their career due to burnout.

The Government’s over-reliance on the private sector for the supply of housing is a strategy that is failing all those people who have contacted me and is failing people across the country. In six years, Dublin City Council has spent €220 million buying back former local authority homes, according to Sharon McGowan’s report for The Times. The State funnels close to €1 billion into the pockets of private landlords each year through the housing assistance payment, HAP, and other rent subsidy schemes. That is a stark example of what we can call the sunk cost fallacy, this Government’s addiction to doling out public money to the private sector at the expense of spending that money on investment in State-built and State-owned housing. Why are we continuing to spend so much money subsidising private sector provision instead of building public housing on public land?

Week in and week out, we hear the same narrative with different figures and new initiatives from the Government. The reality is that none of those initiatives have delivered for the people who have contacted my office or who are contacting all of us all the time.

This week’s Housing for All progress report makes for depressing reading because its promises and aspirations jar with the reality of those contacting my office, and jar with repeated calls from organisations like Focus Ireland and Threshold and from front-line workers. We have seen seven years of strong economic growth wasted, when we should have seen investment in housing provision. The problem has got worse.

This evening the Dáil will debate a Labour Party motion to introduce real, substantial measures to deliver on housing, including an emergency public house-building programme, the extension of the eviction ban to the end of the year and the strengthening of the tenant in situscheme. We ask for fast-tracking of our constructive legislative proposals: our homeless families Bill, our renters’ rights Bill and our Kenny report Bill. All of those, if adopted and enacted by the Government, could and would make a real difference in addressing the housing crisis.

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