Mary Lou McDonald (Dublin Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Fine Gael has now been in power for 12 years. For seven of those years, it has been joined at the hip to Fianna Fáil. On its watch we have gone from housing crisis to housing emergency to housing disaster. The policies Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil have implemented together over the course of the last decade have brought us to where we are today. They have followed an agenda that explicitly transferred to the private market the responsibilities of Government to deliver housing for our people. To understand the emergency of today, we need to look at the disastrous decisions the parties have made in the past.

On entering Government 12 years ago, Fine Gael seized on the austerity imposed by Fianna Fáil and continued to slash capital housing budgets to the point where the Government essentially stopped building public housing. Even with an upturn in the economy and a significant recovery in the public finances, the Government refused to provide the necessary investment to tackle the housing crisis and build the homes our people need. From 2016, Fianna Fáil backed every Fine Gael housing budget to the hilt. In 2019, Micheál Martin claimed he had secured a housing budget to deliver thousands of affordable homes by 2021. How did that go? How many of these homes were delivered? The answer is not one. This crystalised the charade presided over by housing Minister after housing Minister, namely, Phil Hogan, Alan Kelly, Simon Coveney, Eoghan Murphy and Darragh O’Brien. This a list of housing Ministers who refused to change direction when the writing was on the wall, in the midst of an ever-mounting catastrophe. All failed, and failed miserably. As Governments slashed investment in housing, they turbocharged the housing assistance payment, HAP. Instead of building housing, Ministers poured billions into the private rental market. By the way, it was always the Governments' responsibility, not the responsibility of small landlords, to sort out housing. Now, as the private rental market shrinks, many of those families are left with nowhere to go. The decision by Michael Noonan in 2013 to roll out the red carpet for cuckoo and vulture funds will go down as a disaster for our housing market and one for which ordinary people have paid a very heavy price.

The housing emergency did not fall out of the sky. For the last three years, joined by the Green Party, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil have continued to sing from that same ruinous hymn sheet. This Government came to office declaring it would be the Government to fix housing, yet it has clung to the same failed policies. The calamitous results are plain to see. Indeed, they define life in Ireland for a generation. They are sky-high house prices, record, extortionate rents and a level of homelessness we could only have imagined in our worst nightmares. The Government's record has been low targets set and low targets missed, deadlines set and deadlines missed and figures announced and figures massaged. This is a Government big on promises but very short on delivery. The results of its failure is heartbreaking and include lives on hold for a generation, aspirations and dreams surrendered and a claustrophobic, stifling atmosphere where people feel no matter how hard they work or whether they do all the right things, they still will not be able to build a decent future. Many have packed their bags for a new life abroad because they simply cannot make it work at home anymore.

How any member of Government could look anybody in the eye and say its housing policies are working is beyond me. This Government does not deserve the confidence of the Dáil because it does not serve the needs of the people. The message it has sent to a generation who have lost so many years to the crisis the Government created is to wait. Nero fiddles while Rome burns. The Land Development Agency report published yesterday asks people to wait again for the possibility that the Government might build, but not now. It will happen at some point in the future. What planet is the Government living on? On it goes, with the delusion of Government on full and glorious display again today.

Leo Varadkar returned to the Taoiseach’s office in December.

He said housing would be his priority. Well, his first major housing decision is to put 3,000 working families, single people and pensioners at risk of losing their homes by lifting the eviction ban in three days’ time. That is his approach. This affects every renter faced now with the stress, worry and insecurity of getting that call from the landlord with devastating news that will literally turn their lives upside down.

The Taoiseach claims a distinction between receiving an eviction notice and being evicted. He does this with zero regard for the pressure that an eviction notice places on families, with zero regard for the stress, anxiety or the sense of hopelessness that it creates. We have all heard stories of children asking where they will have their birthday party if they must leave, whether their friends will be able to find them or if they will still be able to go to their school. How do you tell children that their home is not their home anymore? How can anyone have confidence in a Government that does this with its eyes wide open, to so many families? How can anybody have confidence in a Taoiseach that cannot answer the straightforward question, where are people meant to go?

There are now 750,000 people living in the private rental sector. Tens of thousands are trapped in a nightmare of extortionate rent and crushing insecurity. In any other generation, they would now own their own homes. Instead, they are trapped paying rip-off rent month-in month-out, with no hope of saving for a deposit. Their chance of home ownership is razor thin and narrows every day because of the repeated failures of this Government to tackle supply and affordability. Homelessness used to be associated with people down on their luck. Now however, thanks to Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, it is a very real fear and a real experience for some working families. We have almost 12,000 people in emergency accommodation, including 3,000 children. The sharpest edge of this scandal is seen in those sleeping in doorways and in the tents that dot the banks of the canals. These are heart-breaking sights that will become more frequent because of the failure to resource emergency accommodation. However, we all know that the true level of homelessness is disguised by the number of those who are couch-surfing, those living with friends on a temporary basis, and those living in overcrowded accommodation. All of this - all of it - is the result of Government policy.

Now the housing crisis presents a real threat to our social cohesion. Not alone is the housing emergency robbing people of a secure home. It is now impacting on staffing in education, in healthcare and on our ability to attract jobs and investment. The Minister will hear this first hand from leaders of industry today at a conference. This spillover threatens our progress, prosperity and success. Therefore, we need change like never before. We need leadership that will bring an all-of-Government approach to tackling this crisis, a Government that will bring energy, pace, ambition, innovation and change.

It does not have to be this way. Housing can be fixed. We can give this generation the chance at life it deserves. Only a change of Government will solve the housing crisis. We in Sinn Féin wish to lead that Government. From day one, we would get down to the work of building tens of thousands of homes on public land. We would build affordable homes. We would get rent under control. We would cut the bureaucracy, the red tape, and the inertia to bring thousands of vacant homes back into use and to harness new technologies for housing construction. We would work with all stakeholders across our society to deliver the biggest public housing programme in the history of the State. A Sinn Féin Government would roll up our sleeves and we would get the job done.

See this speech in context