Joan Collins (Dublin South Central, Independents 4 Change) | Oireachtas source

Unfortunately, I cannot support this motion. This is not an endorsement of the Government's five-year total failure on housing. It is not even a rejection of the motion's argument for how an affordable housing scheme could work. I generally support Sinn Féin's housing policy. We discussed it at our branch meeting in Dublin South-Central recently. What I object to is the shift in focus that has taken place across the political spectrum away from the proper provision of public housing on public land.

Public housing on public land is the singular way we will build enough homes to get out of this housing crisis, countrywide. It is the singular way we will end this crisis and needs to be the main focus across the board. Let the private developers build private housing and sort out the lending crisis that is there, but the focus needs to be on public housing on public land.

The main problem with affordable purchase programmes has always been who they are affordable for. In the Government's case, it is next to no one. I recognise there are two large groups of workers who are left out by current policies: those caught between the housing lists and the cost-rental model; and those who earn too much for cost-rental but not enough to afford to buy privately. Something needs to be done to help people hit by the current housing policy.

Last year, there were 58,824 households on the housing list, excluding sofa surfing, domestic violence , car sleeping overcrowding and HAP recipients who are on the transfer list. We have the room to build 100,000 houses on public land. We could pepper pot cost-rental and affordable housing into new public estates but if we took the land we have, raised the housing income threshold and bought new, unzoned land, we could house hundreds of thousands of people. The removal of hundreds of thousands of people from the private market, be that the rental or the private purchase markets, would have a far greater impact on demand and house prices than this focus on affordable housing schemes. Hundreds of thousands of people could be housed into safe, secure public housing that would reduce prices for everyone, be they looking to rent or to buy.

The reason we are in this housing emergency is we did not build public housing. In fact, we did not just stop building it; we sold off or knocked down much of what we had. The past few decades we have witnessed the failure - year after year - by successive Governments led by Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, supported by the Labour Party and the Green Party, to deliver the public housing we need. Hundreds of thousands of people were taken from State housing into a private market that was not designed to deal with this. The demand pushed prices up to where almost no one could reasonably afford a home. We sold public housing on land that we had We saw the fiascos of Oscar Traynor Road and O'Devaney Gardens. We saw a 20-year plus, and counting, wait for the development of St. Michael's Estate. It has been over 15 years, and counting, for St. Teresa's Gardens. Dolphin House is waiting for regeneration and a section of the estate had to be sold to a private developer to provide the community facilities residents need. We sold off public housing, knocked it down and did not rebuild it and of course we have a housing shortage. The report of the task force for Dublin recommended prioritising the total regeneration of social housing complexes in the city centre. Putting aside the decades of failures in St. Michael's Estate, St. Teresa's Gardens, O'Devaney Gardens and Dolphin House, there are now plans going in for the Basin Street flats that will both remove and reduce community and sports facilities. Is that the new prioritised regeneration we can look forward to seeing? It has been failure after failure.

The LDA was set up to facilitate building on State lands such as CIÉ, ESB or HSE land. Instead, it is mainly building on council lands. The councils should be separately funded and mandated to build council homes on council lands. The Simon Community reported on the HAP scheme. The scheme has been a failure in the private provision of public housing but now it is clearly failing on its own merit. It is down from 1,000 available HAP tenancies in 2020 to just three available with the standard HAP limits in March 2024. That is three properties, yet there are more than 58,000 people on the housing list.

All of these schemes move us further away from what our main focus should be. Yes, there needs to be provision for the people who fall through the cracks or get trapped between different schemes and income thresholds but we need to keep the focus on the one thing that will allow us to build our way out of the housing crisis. We do not need to reinvent the wheel. What we need is the political will to start a campaign for mass public housing built on public land and led by a public construction company. That political will existed between the thirties and sixties when this country was broke. We are now one of the richest countries in the world and can afford to build people's homes.

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