Gerald Nash (Louth, Labour) | Oireachtas source

With respect to the Minister of State, all we got from him this morning was a melange of disconnected words. That is what it was. Frankly, his disinterested tone is only equalled by this Government’s disinterested position on the delivery of housing for the hundreds of thousands in this country who need it and who need a change of approach and change of policy from this Government.

The ESRI will put it well this evening when its officials address the budgetary oversight committee. What they will say - it is reported in The Irish Times today – will represent an absolutely damning and shameful indictment of this Government’s performance on housing. The Minister of State referenced 2022 as the first full year in the context of the pandemic since this Government took office where the Government was able to deliver on its housing proposition in full. The ESRI will say later on this evening that that year put Ireland in the relegation zone in the European Union with regard to investment in housing, down at the bottom of the table with Poland, Greece and Bosnia and Herzegovina. That is no place to be. The ESRI will say that because of this Government’s poor performance on housing delivery, rents and house prices will continue to spiral upwards. Yes, housing supply is going up. However, that depends on how it is measured and how success is measured.

Supply remains insufficient, and the Minister of State knows that only too well. Shamefully, this Government appears to have been blindsided by the kind of population growth we all anticipated a number of years ago. That is to the Government's shame and utter embarrassment, if indeed the Government can be shamed and embarrassed about its housing policy and its failure to deliver.

It has been said time and again in this House that the social contract has been broken. This is the idea that if a person studies or works hard, they will be able to afford a home. That idea of the social contract has not been broken, it has been completely torn asunder. Working people can no longer afford a home. This is not just a problem; it is, as our President has said, a disaster. We have to make housing affordable. The Government Housing for All policy or housing for some policy, as we describe it, has been a miserable failure in this regard. The Minister of State should not just take our word for it. The housing industry itself is beginning to wake up to the damage it is doing to our society and economy. The industry was recently lambasted by one of its own, the boss of Cairn Homes. He said that the lack of affordable housing was destroying the economy and driving a kind of housing-induced brain drain, forcing our brightest and best out of the country in search of a home. He noted that home ownership rates among 25- to 39-year-olds, once considered a prime home-owning age group, had dwindled to just 7%. To put that in context, it was 22% in 2011. As my colleagues stated earlier, the Labour Party's assessment is that we require 50,000 new builds over the next ten years, far exceeding the Government's anaemic and lacklustre goal of 30,000. When we articulated our assessment at the time, it was utterly sneered at by the Government. It said there was only one show in town, Housing for All, and it still stands by that policy, even though it is failing abysmally to deliver.

The Government has an utter obsession with property and land ownership. This is in the very DNA of Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil and leads to the financialisation of our housing system. I will give one example of how ineffective the Government's planned approach is to freeing up serviced residential zoned land. The current planned zoned land tax is pitifully low. It could be increased to disincentivise developers and landowners from sitting on land. It was announced in the budget last year, but then what did the Government do? It reviewed it and bent the knee again to property developers and farmers who have already seen their land zoned and have benefited financially from it. They are now enabled by this Government to continue to wait and see the price of their land rise in value before the Government actually decides to implement the policy it announced last year. This is one example of how the Government is failing.

It is time that the workers who created the economy which the Government likes to boast about all the time got a realistic chance to own their own homes. The plan the Government has is not the plan that is going deliver.

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