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

Seven months of public outrage and protests have finally forced the Government to recognise the state of Palestine. I hope that is going to be accompanied by sanctions.

I wish to discuss another protest that will happen this Saturday at the Customs House over the Government’s failed housing policies. This comes at an appropriate moment, given that the Housing Commission has confirmed what the dogs on the street know, namely, that the Government has made a catastrophic mess of the housing situation, resulting in untold housing misery for hundreds of thousands of working people, young people and the 13,500 people languishing in homelessness. It is no surprise to me that, while the Government received this report some time ago, it did not publish it. It is an outrage that journalists have it and can read it but TDs cannot. What is clear is that the report is utterly damning of the Government’s housing policy failures. The references are fairly familiar at this point, but they are worth reiterating: ineffective decision-making; spending more than most other European countries but getting less; a chronic deficit of 250,000 houses compared with what we need; the failure of the Government’s rent pressure zones to control rents; the Government’s failure to deliver enough social and affordable housing; and the need for an emergency response, something that we in the Opposition have been appealing to the Government to adopt for years. The most telling part of the whole report is where it reads “the overall strategy to successfully achieve a sustainable housing system is not complicated.” The Government has managed not only to complicate it, but to make a dog’s dinner of it, resulting in a great deal of misery, suffering and hardship.

The core of the problem is that most of the housing in this country is delivered by private landlords, private developers and private investors who are interested in profit, not in putting affordable roofs over people’s heads. Some of them actively engage in speculation on housing, vacant properties and land. The Government’s policy is to pour approximately €1 billion every year into various subsidies, including HAP, RAS and leasing, for landlords who still fail to deliver the housing we need, with anything they do deliver being unaffordable in terms of rents and house prices.

Is the Government going to accept the need for a radical reset of policy that would prioritise the delivery of social and affordable housing, control rents to make them affordable and introduce “use it or lose it” policies on vacant and derelict properties in order to stop the profiteering of property investors and speculators?

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