Gary Gannon (Dublin Central, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State for his contribution. Another thing that seems to not change is the same old, same old politics which is failing generations of families in the country. I thank Deputy Cian O'Callaghan for his work on this motion. This is the first opportunity the Social Democrats have had in this term to keep the Government's feet to the fire for the housing catastrophe in this country. As has been proven, I do not expect the Government to turn around and accept that some of these motions would make the situation better. Both recent and long-gone history have shown that Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil are fond of ignoring progressive policies and solutions to further what seems to be their own agenda.

It is an agenda and a belief in who gets to benefit from property and who gets to suffer from it in this country. It is an agenda which serves the country's highest earners, its oldest money and the culture of corporate landlords and billionaire multinational companies which have been coaxed here during Fine Gael's and Fianna Fáil's disastrous terms in power. Our party, the Social Democrats, along with the public have come to learn that there is no intention to serve the majority of people in this country who are feeling the full weight of this catastrophe. These include the 520,000 adults trapped in their childhood bedrooms. We can only imagine the impact it is having on people in their late 20s and 30s who go home each night to a bedroom where they spent their childhood years. It is an indignity that we need to get in front of. It is unbecoming of a republic. They include the graduates who cannot sustain a life here. They include the college students who only a few weeks ago were given their offers of college courses and got really excited but then the sudden deflation sets in of where in God's name they might get to find accommodation, or where they can find accommodation, how they might pay for it.

Many families are going without necessities to feed their children, those gasping for air below the poverty line. They have come to learn by the Government's actions that this catastrophe will not be addressed under its care. In the case of housing, its actions have demonstrated this by allowing the cost of a home to increase by more than 25% since it came into office. It has sat idly by while the rate of homeownership has declined to a 30-year low. It has demonstrated this to us by permitting rents to double in just over a decade, ushering in a generation-defining housing catastrophe that is ravaging every echelon of Irish society and is becoming absolutely devastating to the human condition.

The Government must think the citizens are stupid. What must it think of the Irish public? The public are starting to see through it and its days are gone. When we bring forward these motions, we do so in the full knowledge that the Government probably will not change its position but this will be what the Social Democrats in government will do. This motion lays out what housing policy will look like. We listen to the people impacted by the Government's decisions and they are telling us that the rot in the housing market it has allowed to fester has ruined their prospects of a future in the places they call home.

My constituency of Dublin Central has a history of communities being displaced. Many families and friendships were torn apart in the 1960s and 1970s by bad planning decisions which left residents in places like the docklands indiscriminately scattered in suburbs that were not designed for communities at that point. In modern times the Government is demonstrating this today because it is allowing those same families who live in communities such as those in my constituency to be displaced because they have absolutely no prospect of being able to afford a home in the places where they grew up.

Someone who has grown up in Dublin city would be lucky to snag a lease on a bedsit for under €2,000 a month and that is if they are lucky enough to be chosen as a tenant with landlords now demanding three months of bank statements to even be considered. Landlords are demanding bank statements from people to be considered to live in the places where they have grown up.

The people of Dublin are being asked to beg for permission to live in the places they call home. There is no greater injustice than that. It is degrading. Those communities will lose their sense of place, identity and heritage unless radical policy change is adopted with urgency. Zero affordable purchase homes were delivered in 2020 and 2021. A meagre 323 units were delivered in 2022. I do not accept the Government's take on this motion, headed by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael in cahoots with the Green Party. The winds of change are blowing and this will be enacted with or, more likely, without them.

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