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

The Central Bank has followed the Housing Commission in telling us that our housing needs are twice - maybe more than twice - what Housing for All projected them to be. That is how inadequate the Housing for All plan is. To meet these targets, we have to double housing output. In particular, we have to dramatically increase the social and affordable housing component of that because what the market is delivering is completely unaffordable for probably the majority of working people in this country. How on earth are we going to do that? How are we going to get to that level - we have no choice but to do so as otherwise we are facing a pretty grim future in terms of the housing crisis - when the construction capacity of private firms simply cannot do it? Even Goodbody stockbrokers, as I raised with the Taoiseach previously, has indicated that only a small number of firms can deliver houses on a large scale. I put it to the Taoiseach that we need a State construction company. Some of the money we now have from Apple and the big surpluses and so on that we have should be used as seed capital for a State construction company to build that housing. Whatever we think ideologically about private or public, the private sector does not have the capacity to do that. The State has to develop its own construction capacity in order to deliver that scale of social and affordable housing.

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