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

Sadly, one of the things we share on this island, North and South, is a very severe housing crisis affecting tens of thousands of people who are on council housing waiting lists. Down here it is 57,000 officially but actually nearer to 100,000 when one takes into account the HAP and RAS transfer lists. In the North 47,000 people are waiting for social housing, 35,000 of whom are considered to be in serious housing stress. The new Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, has just announced - Keir Starmer does not delay in disappointing - that the new Labour Party Government in the UK, faced with a very severe housing crisis there, is not going to directly build council housing anymore but is going to rely on the private sector to deliver housing. It is absolutely shocking. I suggest that the Taoiseach would point out to Keir Starmer that this policy has been a disastrous failure. Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil have pursued it for a couple of decades and it has left us with the worst housing crisis we have ever seen because they left it up to private developers to deliver housing rather than the State directly building council housing on public land. It would be a disaster if Starmer's new policy is the way they try to address the housing crisis in the North.

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