Conor Sheehan (Limerick City, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I dtús báire, ba mhaith liom mo bhuíochas a ghabháil le muintir chathair Luimnigh as ucht an deis seo a thabhairt dom agus déanaim comhghairdeas leis an Taoiseach agus an Rialtas nua. As I rise here to speak for the first time as a TD for my home city of Limerick, I want to sincerely thank the people for electing me. Without them, I would not be here today. I am cognisant of what an enormous privilege and responsibility it is to be able to speak freely in Dáil Éireann, the Parliament of a free republic.

They say to govern is to choose. This coalition of convenience has chosen, in the flowery language of ambivalence, to do very little to deliver the meaningful change that the people who elected me are seeking.

There is nothing flowery about this governing arrangement and this whole sordid arrangement has more than a whiff off it. As we meet here today, I am conscious that homelessness, house prices and rents in this country have never been as high, with the number of new homes built last year falling by 7%. Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and their coalition colleagues have shown, through deed, that they will not and cannot deal with this crisis. The Government's own Housing Commission report has called for a radical reset of housing policy and the Government's response to this has been to effectively pretend that it does not exist. It is clear from the programme for Government that this Administration is intent on ploughing the same failed furrow as the previous one. We, in Labour, believe in an active State and a social floor for health and housing, a threshold beneath which no citizen would be allowed to fall, and it is on that basis we will hold this Government to account.

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