Michael McNamara (Clare, Independent) | Oireachtas source

There is a question mark over whether Covid held the Government back or whether the Government’s response to Covid and the regulations it introduced regarding house building specifically held the situation back. People could not put a roof on a house down a rural road without gardaí being called. It seemed ridiculous at the time, but I do not want to digress into that discussion.

I acknowledge that houses are being built and the number of first-time buyers is increasing, but what of the squeezed middle? When I grew up, people who worked in the local chipboard factory, which was the big employer, could get a council house. They could move into that house with their family and say that it was the home in which they would bring up their families. Young gardaí, teachers, nurses, local authority employees and civil servants who are starting out now do not have that possibility. That is the cohort I am specifically asking about. They are caught between the income they need for affordable housing – income levels in the Defence Forces may be increasing, but such housing is still beyond the reach of its personnel – and the level at which they can get social housing. The latter threshold has been increased, but it still leaves a huge gap into which ordinary people fall. We talk about our State, but without these people, it cannot exist. They cannot hope to move into a house and call it their own in the Ireland of today. Notwithstanding the advances that the Government has made in the provision of housing, those advances are for people with a lot of money, and we do not pay these people on whom our State relies a lot of money, at least when they are starting out. Maybe we do after ten or 15 years, but they are almost middle-aged at that point.

That is the problem.

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