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

I add my voice to the condemnation of the outrageous treatment of the events that occurred for Tori Towey and call on the UAE Government to immediately drop the charges and allow her to come home.

This is the last week the Dáil is sitting before the summer recess and the last opportunity I will have to ask a question during Leaders' Questions. For six weeks now, we and many others in the Opposition have been calling on the Government for a discussion of the Housing Commission report, which was published in May and is absolutely damning with respect to the Government's failure to address the housing and homelessness crisis. We got a commitment that the Government would do so, but it has not. Was the reason the Government does not want to discuss the Housing Commission report revealed in the budget parameters that were announced yesterday in the summer economic statement? It is absolutely clear that the Housing Commission's call to effectively double the output of housing and dramatically increase the delivery of social and affordable housing to address the housing crisis is not provided for in the summer economic statement.

Last year, the Government allocated €5 billion to Housing for All to deliver 33,000 houses, including approximately 16,000 social and affordable houses. That €5 billion was to deliver on targets that the Housing Commission says are half of what is needed. It states that we have a housing deficit of 250,000 properties, that we need to build 60,000 houses a year and that we must dramatically increase the proportion of social and affordable housing. A basic calculation shows that we would need an additional €5 billion to do that, or close to that figure. However, the additional expenditure on capital investment that the Government announced yesterday is €1.4 billion and presumably that is not just for housing. We need investment in schools, water infrastructure, and special needs and disability services. What was announced yesterday, which the Minister said he will stick tightly to in the budget, is a fraction of what is necessary to deliver the increase in housing output necessary to address a housing crisis that has more than 14,000 people, including 4,000 children, in emergency accommodation; that has approximately 170,000 people on housing waiting lists; and that has completely locked tens of thousands of ordinary people - young people and working people - out of a housing market that is out of control. What does the Taoiseach say to that? Will he and the Government actually take seriously the scale of the housing emergency or are they just gaslighting people? The money the Government has allocated in the budget to deal with this crisis-----

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