Matt Carthy (Cavan-Monaghan, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

If I were to say "systemic failures, ineffective decision making, reactive policymaking, risk aversion, impacting supply, and undermining affordability", someone would think I was taking an excerpt from a speech Deputy Ó Broin had made in this House, but I am not. These are excerpts from the Housing Commission report, the Housing Commission that was set up and established by the current parties in government and which has delivered a damning indictment on what every single Irish family already knows, that this Government is not only not delivering but is actually failing in housing output and is making the housing crisis worse every single year. The most damning line in the report that we have seen accuses the Government of the failure to treat housing as a critical social and economic priority, and so say all of us.

It is a great development that we have caught sight of even part of the Housing Commission report because we all know the Government was going to do its damnedest to ensure people would not get sight of it, especially in advance of the local and European Union elections on 7 June.

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However, they have now seen it. They have seen the findings of the Housing Commission outlining that, despite our having one of the highest levels of public expenditure for housing, the Government has one of the poorest outcomes. Virtually every family in the State would say that is absolutely the case. The commission’s report, despite all the spin, rhetoric and bluster from the Minister, Deputy O’Brien, other Ministers and the Taoiseach, sets out very clearly that the housing crisis will not get better under the Government and that it will in fact continue to get much worse.

What needs to happen? The first thing that needs to happen on 7 June is that people need to send the Government a very strong message. I implore them to do so if they want to ensure young people no longer have to go to Sydney, Toronto or Dubai just to use their qualifications and have a decent standard of living. If they want to ensure their kids in their 30s who are living in the family boxroom with their own children have the prospect of a future that any other generation would expect or take for granted, they must send the Government a message. Above all, people must start believing there is a better and fairer way, because there absolutely is. There is no reason a state with such wealth and with a government with such resources should be presiding over continued failure in housing delivery. God, where will we find the solutions? The solutions have been presented but the difficulty is that the Government has turned its face against them.

What are the solutions? We need to see the delivery of the biggest public house-building programme in the history of the State. We need to meet social and affordable housing needs. We need to deliver, in particular, affordable houses at an unprecedented scale. It should not need to be said that we need to deliver houses that teachers, gardaí, factory workers and retail workers can actually afford – houses that people of every generation before us could gain access to. That needs to happen. We need to stop vulture funds from buying up family homes and student housing and support struggling homeowners with proper mortgage interest relief. Then we need to speed up the construction of homes. We have to cut red tape, ensure the necessary resources and finance are available and reform the planning process so we can deliver at speed the houses that are needed. We have to ensure we have the workers to build the homes by intervening so apprentices can complete their training on time and that we encourage all those qualified construction workers with Irish qualifications who are all over the world to come back to Ireland to help us in this task. We need to take the pressure off renters. We need to put a month’s rent back into their pockets so they will have some hope of saving for mortgages to buy the home they want to own.

There is a better and fairer way but this Government is not going to deliver it. It is time for change.

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