Ivana Bacik (Dublin Bay South, Labour) | Oireachtas source

This Bill and the amendments from the Seanad give us an opportunity to address that bigger issue of the Land Development Agency. We in the Labour Party certainly supported the Land Development Agency in principle. We think it is a vital vehicle to deliver homes at scale, affordable homes that we badly need. However, as Deputies Ó Broin and Boyd Barrett have pointed out, there are real concerns about the delays in output from the Land Development Agency. Six years on from its inception, the Shanganagh scheme we have been speaking about is the first housing scheme to be delivered by the Land Development Agency on State-owned land. The slowness of pace of delivery and the concerns about resourcing the Land Development Agency, which I have consistently raised in this House with the Minister, Deputy O'Brien, are the concerns we have about its capacity to deliver homes at the scale that is needed. The Government has been promising revised upwards housing targets for well over a year now. We know the housing target that has been set is far too low. The Government is falling short of even meeting those targets in the Housing for All programme, yet we are still not seeing those revised upwards targets. We all know that target of 33,000 homes per year is simply far too low to meet the real level of need out there, which is about double that target, at least. That is becoming clear from every expert group report and from our own experience.

Just this week, I was in my own constituency meeting people on doorsteps. I heard the typical story of two teachers in a two-income household, both of whom have good public jobs, renting a home because they cannot afford to buy anywhere near where their children are in school. That story is replicated across the country. We are all hearing such stories all the time and that is before we even start to think about the terrible stories of the 4,500 children in emergency accommodation in homelessness because the State cannot provide adequate numbers of houses for them.

The Land Development Agency can and should be transformed into a State construction company. We should see the sort of State investment in the delivery of homes that would enable delivery at the scale and capacity that is so badly needed to fix and address this housing crisis. We are all conscious there will be an election in a few weeks' time. This Bill is clearly not the Bill that is going to provide the necessary means to address this, but we need to think in a far more ambitious and radical way about how to address the housing crisis. I know it will form a crucial part of the debates during the election, but it is also important that we address it in this House, even in the last few weeks of the Dáil term, and that at every opportunity when we are debating housing legislation, we in the Opposition can put forward our concerns about the Government's failure of ambition and failure of urgency in addressing the housing crisis.

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