Conor Sheehan (Limerick City, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State to the House and echo the comments of my colleague, Deputy Kelly, about Tony Maher.

This programme for Government contains more reviews than the RTÉ Guide and offers little in the way of hope for renters, people on the housing list or people languishing in hotels, especially in my city, Limerick. It offers more of the same and does not contain anything remotely resembling the radical reset in housing policy called for in the Government's own Housing Commission report. It is difficult to objectively critique the Government's housing policy because it does not have one. Fine Gael's attitude to housing is to leave it to Fianna Fáil and Fianna Fáil in turn has attempted something a little like a David Blaine-style illusion, promising 40,000 homes per year in the run-up to the election when the reality was just 30,350 and that was revealed, of course, after the fact. The Taoiseach and the previous Minister for housing chose to ignore the warnings from the Central Statistics Office, CSO, the Economic and Social Research Institute, ESRI, and the Central Bank that completion figures would be nowhere near 40,000 and continued parroting that figure because it suited them in the run-up to the general election. There is no doubt in my mind but that it benefited them in the election. Not only was this House deceived, but the general public were deceived and that damages trust and integrity in politics. The Taoiseach said yesterday in the Dáil that it was his genuine belief that we would reach 40,000, despite the fact that every available expert was telling him we would not.

The programme for Government commits to delivering 300,000 homes per year by 2030 with scant detail on how this will be achieved. We are just to believe it will happen by osmosis, just as we were to believe that 40,000 homes would be built last year. Within the seven pages dedicated to housing in the programme for Government, there is no stated commitment to examine any of the key recommendations from the Housing Commission, the Government's independent body, which it has effectively decided to pretend does not exist. The Department of housing stated previously it would undertake a full assessment of the report and cost its implementation. With no mention of this in the programme for Government, I will be forgiven for being doubtful.

The Government has committed to a new housing programme which, to all intents and purposes, sounds like Housing for All with a nip, tuck and a bit of botox. As a new Deputy in the House, today feels like Groundhog Day because here we are at the start of a new term with the Government intent on ploughing on with the worst of the previous administration.

In my city of Limerick, the Land Development Agency, LDA, has a number of key strategic sites, such as the Colbert quarter where there is potential for at least 2,800 homes to be built, the gasworks site, the Rosbrien site and so on. Yet, three years on from its launch, all we have seen is the appointment of a design team for one of these sites and nothing but glossy brochures for any of the others. We have a new Minister, but the same tired policies or lack thereof. They are the same tired policies that added more than a quarter to the cost of homes and rent since Housing for All was introduced and have seen homelessness skyrocket, with child homelessness in particular going up by well over 75%. The new Government - if I can even call it new - appears intent on carrying on the previous Government's legacy of failure, and seems to want to try to go one better. There is no ambition in this programme for Government. There is no imagination. There is no radical reset of housing policy as was called for by the Housing Commission. As a young person, I see nothing in the programme for Government to offer young people hope to get on the property ladder or at the very least to be able to move out of their parents' house to rent without forking out more than half their wages to a landlord. There is no commitment to a rent freeze or a ban on eviction and very little in the way of strengthening renters' rights, such as implementing model tenancy agreements, allowing tenants to rent unfurnished properties and not forcing them to pay more than a month's rent as a deposit. That is something the Labour Party introduced in the previous Dáil in 2021. It was the first Bill that Deputy Bacik introduced.

I am also concerned about the creeping privatisation of social housing and I urge the Government to establish a social housing Act to ensure the long-term viability of our social housing stock. We have become far too reliant on social leasing to bump up the numbers. We need to move away from that model and support local authorities and approved housing bodies, AHBs, to build more homes. This Government is wedded and welded to the same inflationary policies as the previous Government. While the help-to-buy and first home schemes sound good on paper, virtually all independent analysis says that these policies are driving up house prices and the Government's proposal to extend them to second-hand homes will put yet another rocket under house prices which are now higher than at the peak of the Celtic tiger. Moreover, we know from Central Bank analysis that these schemes disproportionately benefit people on higher incomes.

The Labour Party believes in an active State because the private sector alone does not have the capacity to deliver the homes we need. The Davy report states we will need 93,000 homes per year if the population hits 6 million as predicted by 2031. The programme for Government commits to 50,000 units per year by 2031 but the Government was only able to deliver 30,000 units last year. It is clear that the Government does not even have the capacity to meet its own targets, not to mind to build the number of homes we actually need. The Government must change tack. The Housing Commission report was clear and we in the Labour Party have been clear that only the Government has deep enough pockets to underwrite the level of housing the country needs.

On workers' rights, it is clear from the half page in the programme for Government that this is a coalition of cosy crony capitalism. There is no mention of a living wage in the entire document, no commitment to transpose the EU adequate minimum wage directive and no commitment to a right to flexible work or to improve statutory leave entitlements.

In the time available, I will turn to my constituency, Limerick City, and in particular to University Hospital Limerick, UHL, the most overcrowded hospital in the State, consistently breaking its own records.

It is beyond clear that the people of Limerick and the wider mid-west need at least one additional emergency department. We did not need a HIQA review to tell us that.

See this speech in context