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

They deliberately misled the public about the reasons for the housing crisis and not just about the numbers or targets. They misled the public by saying 40,000 were built when only 30,000 were built. They also misled the public as to why, after more than a decade, they have not solved the housing crisis. The reason is that they are dancing to the tune of people who are making money from it. That is why the Government will not build social housing, ban no-fault evictions or build affordable housing that people can afford. That is why it will not impose rent controls and why families and children are living in squalor in emergency accommodation. Somebody is making money out of it, whether that be investment funds, vulture funds, landlords, property speculators or developers, and the Government will not do anything about it.

In relation to the crisis in the health service, the Government said that it was trying to recruit people but that it is difficult to do so. We have been campaigning for the past six months, prompted by health workers who explained to us last summer that the Government is not trying to recruit people, and we have raised this repeatedly. It is not that it is difficult. The Government is not trying to do it because of pay and numbers, which it never announced publicly. The Government has been rumbled by health workers who are balloting. All grades of health workers have balloted overwhelmingly in favour of industrial action because the Government has not been lying but has been misleading the public about its failure to recruit people into the health services. Similarly, when it comes to section 39 workers, the Government says it is difficult to recruit people. It is difficult because a significant number of people who look after the disabled and who provide care for them work for lesser pay and conditions than those who are employed directly by the HSE. They have been forced to ballot for industrial action because the Government will not give them pay parity and proper conditions of employment.

My final point relates to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition. Where did that come from? That was not mentioned. The Government parties said during the election campaign that they were for Palestine, that they would pass the occupied territories Bill and that they cared about the genocide, but then they inserted a definition into the programme for Government that effectively is designed to censor anybody who says the Israeli state project is an apartheid, racist project.

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