Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, Solidarity) | Oireachtas source

The Taoiseach is the last man standing from the Fianna Fáil Governments that blew up the property bubble and then saw the whole thing come crashing down and ordinary people paid the price for a decade or so. It seems the Taoiseach is committed to going back to the future. He is resurrecting the same policies that caused the 2008 financial crash. At the weekend, it was tax breaks for developers, whom the banking inquiry, the Housing Commission and many others found to be instrumental in blowing up that bubble. There was also a proposal to lift the rent pressure zones.

This morning, in the Government's countermotion on housing, it states it is engaging "with domestic lenders to ensure that the banking sector is appropriately using its lending capacity to support the development of new housing nationwide" and developing "new financing sources, especially for brownfield sites and small builders with support from ... domestic banks as well as State support of equity investment". This is a long-winded way of saying that the Government wants the banks to lend more to property developers. The Taoiseach has suffered badly from amnesia in the past. He claimed that there was no bank bailout, for example. Has he also forgotten that the banks were bailed out because of billions of euro of bad loans to private developers? When will he learn the lessons of his own history and stop relying on the failing private market?

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