Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

For a considerable time People Before Profit has argued we need a State construction company in order to address the absolutely dire housing and homelessness crisis and to deliver the housing we need, and especially the social and affordable housing we need.

The evidence for that is manifold. The Government has not met its own social housing targets, nor its affordable housing targets. The national residential property price index today again confirms private developers and the private sector are still delivering housing that is getting ever more expensive. Prices were up 4% last year, this is the seventh month in a row that house prices have gone up, and they are now above Celtic tiger heights. Something I have mentioned a few times in the last few weeks is the private sector is not building family homes, that is, three- and four-bedroom homes, but are disproportionately building one- and two-bedroom ones because these maximise profits and this is contributing directly to the rise in child and family homelessness.

As if all that was not enough evidence, we have more today with Goodbody Stockbrokers - an unlikely source - confirming that private developers and private builders simply do not have the capacity to meet the housing requirements of the State. The report says the State's homebuilding sector has a "distinct lack of scale" and that "This lack of scale threatens the attainment of Ireland’s housing requirements". This was also recorded in an ESRI report at the beginning of this year that said we do not have enough construction workers to deliver on the State's housing requirements and we are probably 15,000 to 20,000 construction workers short of getting to the necessary levels of housing supply in order to begin to address the housing crisis. Goodbody elaborates on the point when it says that compared with England the top ten builders here are building a far lower proportion of the housing we need, that only five companies built more than 500 units last year and that the Irish building and construction sector is dominated by small-scale builders who are building on average 34 units per year.

We are simply not at the races in terms of delivering the scale of housing output and especially the social and affordable housing output we need to address the crisis. Do we not now have all the evidence we need that the State must have its own construction capacity? The private developers and builders are not capable of giving us the housing supply, and particularly the affordable and social housing supply, that we need to address the dire and urgent housing crisis.

See this speech in context