Mattie McGrath (Tipperary, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I too am interested in this motion. You could not make it up. You could not dream it up. We have an underspend in housing while so many - 10,0000, 11,000 or 12,000 - people are homeless. Mention has been made of bedsits. We had them in Dublin but many parties on the left were clamouring for them to be closed down stating they were scandalous, abusive and everything else. They were thousands of roofs over people's heads who had units. The standards are too high now across the board. We have regulators and regulations and everything else for everything. Builders are walking away from it. It was the same for the ordinary householders who had a second property. I will not call them the dreaded "L" word. They were ordinary decent people and have been demonised by parties of the left as bad, horrible, greedy people. Then we stoke up a fear here. We have a housing crisis. Of course we have, when you will not allow people to build and you will not build yourself.

The people who make the most noise here would not know one side of a bag of cement or a shovel from the other and never built a house. They can talk all right. I spent four or five years on the housing committee. It was the biggest waste of time I ever spent in my life. Reports and reports and discussions and debates and site visits. The Government parties do not have the will to build the houses and the regulations are too high, even for all the schemes the Government announced and will announce after the eviction ban. I voted for the continuation of the ban. I voted to keep it. All the regulation and schemes will be announced but they get bogged down in red tape. I have been a member of the voluntary sector for decades, of Caisleán Nua Voluntary Housing. I was chairman for years. We have our AGM next Monday night and it does great work and many more hundreds of organisations like it can and will do it. Unshackle them. They will build within the regulations and everything, but we cannot pile on more and more regulations and demonise the good people who want to build houses, demonise the developers, demonise everybody. To hell or to Connacht with them all. We will keep rattling the can and we will get more votes by doing so. We will tell the people that we will look after them. However, we see that they are not being looked after in Northern Ireland and other parts of the country are not being looked after. This is a damn fine charade.

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