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

We extend a warm welcome to Shauna and Eve from Ardee Community School. They are in transition year and doing work experience, unfortunately for them, with Deputy Ó Murchú. I am sure they will be well able for him.

The coalition parties present themselves as champions of homeownership. However, as NESC has documented, there has been a major shift towards rental and away from homeownership on their watch. Homeownership has fallen significantly and private rental has more than doubled over the past three decades. This has not happened by accident. It is the result of deliberate Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael policy over the past 30 years to, in effect, transfer the responsibility of public housing delivery from the State to private landlords. Lower income working families who should have been provided with permanent social or affordable homes were left in what are, in effect, temporary tenancies, at a massive cost to the State, let it be said, and now at a cost to families' sense of security and wellbeing. To this day, Government policy refuses to come clean on this failed approach. Again, both parties are responsible for this.

In 2016, the number of social housing applicants living in the private rented sector on short two-year leases subsidised by housing assistance payment, HAP, nearly quadrupled. The same year, a Fine Gael Minister removed this cohort of renters from the social housing list as well as those renters in receipt of rental accommodation scheme, RAS, payments, and then claimed the social housing list had fallen. The Minister, Deputy O'Brien, continues to stand over this massaging of housing data.

The NESC report into private rental in Ireland also sets out the Government parties' failure to incorporate into their national housing plans Ireland's significant and expected population increases.

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