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

The issue of housing is not only responsible for untold hardship, anxiety and suffering for large numbers of people who are at the wrong end of the housing crisis, but it is also probably the greatest economic problem we now face, and increasingly so. We cannot recruit teachers because they cannot afford to live in places like Dublin. We cannot recruit enough health workers because they cannot afford to pay rents or hope to buy homes. Many of our young people coming out of university are leaving the country because they do not believe they have the prospect of ever owning their own homes or affording these rents.

The ESRI has produced a report that states the Government has to dramatically increase its housing targets. I hope there is finally an acknowledgement from the Government that that is the case. However, the main question is not whether we will increase output, which we have to do, but whether that output will be affordable. When considering what has happened on Oscar Traynor Road, I am fearful about what will happen at Shanganagh and Cherrywood in terms of affordable housing. Where the latter is concerned, we still do not know how many houses we will get, whether they will be affordable, etc. The policy of delivering affordable housing or even cost-rental housing is not working because the private developers we are relying on or the market benchmarks we are using are incapable of delivering affordability. When will the Government cop on and see that the State, through its own construction company or capacity, has to build housing on a not-for-profit basis that is genuinely affordable and sufficient to address the chronic waiting lists?

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