Holly Cairns (Cork South West, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputy Cian O'Callaghan and his team for their work on this motion. The Government claims to prioritise homeownership. It is a brazen claim, and one which I do not think anyone really believes. The reality is that for every year that Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael spend in office, rates of homeownership decline. Do not take my word for it. The latest evidence of the Government's relationship with homeownership was detailed in the census figures yesterday. Rates of homeownership declined from nearly 80% in 1991 to 66% last year. We know those figures alone do not tell the whole story, and that the brunt of this collapse in homeownership is mainly being felt by people in their 20s, 30s and 40s, who have spent years paying crazy high rents and are now priced out of buying a home. Despite the Government’s consistently upbeat assessment of its own performance in housing, the reality is relentlessly depressing. The share of 25- to 34-year-olds who own their own home more than halved between 2004 and 2019, plummeting from 60% to just 27%. Young people cannot afford to buy a home and increasingly, they cannot even afford rent. In 2006, the average age of a first-time buyer was 29. Last year, the average age of a young person who managed to move out of home for the first time was 28. Once, young people could aspire to homeownership. Now, they are finding it difficult to even move out of their childhood bedrooms.

If that is not evidence that this and successive governments are certainly not made up of the parties of homeownership, I do not know what is. The rate and extent of the decline of homeownership among young people has been rapid and stark, and it is having a devastating impact. It can feel like Government parties think about housing in economic terms or as an investment, but people do not build their lives in an investment vehicle. They build it in a family, in a home and in a community. Housing enables people to build relationships and put down roots. It allows for feelings of safety and security.

When we talk about the housing disaster, we are not just talking about bricks and mortar; we are talking about young people whose adult lives are on hold because they cannot afford to move out of their childhood bedrooms. It is about couples postponing having a family because they cannot find affordable housing. It is about the stress and anxiety that causes once happy relationships to break down. It is about living with a permanent knot in your stomach. It is about being afraid of no longer being able to afford the rent, being afraid of getting a notice to quit from your landlord, being afraid of ending up in emergency accommodation, being afraid for the future and your place in it, being afraid that your life will permanently be on hold, and being afraid that you will never be able to afford to do what your own parents did on just one income – own a modest home.

The Government claims housing is its biggest priority, but we saw where its priorities really lie last week with the ridiculous row about tax cuts. Giving people a few euro extra every week while at the same time denying them their own homes is not helpful. What is the point of a tax cut when that money will be swallowed up by record rent and house prices? Why is the Government not prioritising the delivery of affordable and social homes instead of trying to buy voters off with their own money? Incredibly, just 323 affordable purchase homes were delivered last year in the middle of the biggest housing disaster in the history of the State. We have heard all of the Government's promises before and we have witnessed it breaking them. The Government has no credibility on housing because it refuses to learn the lessons from its mistakes. All of the important metrics tell the Government that the housing crisis is deteriorating. Rents have never been higher, house prices have never been higher and homelessness has never been higher, but the Government refuses to change course.

The Government continues to rely on the private sector to deliver social and affordable homes. It continues to pour subsidies into the pockets of developers and investment funds. It continues to allow cuckoo funds buy up residential homes. It continues to use public money to invest in the delivery of private rental developments which are unaffordable to rent and unavailable to buy. When will this Government change its disastrous policies?

The solutions are there in our motion, so why is the Government refusing to adopt them? It is becoming clearer all the time that this is now about the Government refusing to admit it is wrong. It seems like an ego issue. The Government is refusing to help thousands of people who are homeless, refusing to help a generation trapped in rent and refusing to do its job, which is to provide people with a roof over their heads.

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