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

This Labour motion offered the first opportunity in the Thirty-fourth Dáil to address and debate the question of housing. The motion set out a constructive and ambitious set of proposals and a pathway to reform housing policy and ensure Government could provide a resolution to undoubtedly the biggest challenge facing it and all of us and the biggest civil rights issue of this generation. We set out a credible pathway. We heard seven first-time Labour TDs speak with energy, passion and ideas about tackling the housing emergency and ramping up the supply of homes. Contrast the energy, ambition and constructive proposals from the Labour benches with the tumbleweed blowing across the Government benches for the two hours of this debate. We did not have the courtesy of one senior Minister, let alone the no-show housing Minister, James Browne, who did not show. All we heard was two junior Ministers reading bland, pre-prepared scripts devoid of ambition and urgency, and utterly dismissive of the seriousness of the housing emergency.

The Taoiseach is now in the Chamber. He has spoken of the need to address the housing emergency. I think he recognises this but that recognition is not evident in the Government's response to today's housing motion. The first motion on housing before this Dáil should have been an opportunity for Government to set out its stall and set out the evidence-based policies it proposes to introduce in order to deliver for the communities we all represent. Instead, we have heard from the Government and Taoiseach over recent days a series of back-of-the-envelope, Bertie-era, back-to-the-future proposals. Apparently the Taoiseach is now thinking about abolishing, scrapping or reversing the rent pressure zones. I know he has rowed back a little on that, and that is welcome, but he has left renters across the country in a state of uncertainty and great distress. We are all hearing from them. I heard from one constituent just this morning about this. Renters who pay €2,500 per month on average in Dublin are left in uncertainty because the Taoiseach has floated the idea of doing away with rent pressure zones but given no indication of what they might be replaced with for renters who desperately need protection and security.

The other big idea the Taoiseach floated is tax breaks for developers. Yet, as my colleague Ged Nash has just pointed out, we have no evidence that they would assist in delivering greater supply. The evidence is to the contrary if we look at the ESRI's paper on tax breaks in construction, which simply, as the ESRI said, transfer State money to developers without any discernible or significant increase in the supply of homes.

The Taoiseach's Government's housing policy has failed and that failure has been particularly evident in the appalling mismatch between the actual figures and the figures he and his senior Ministers in the last Government promised would be delivered in housing last year. Time and again the previous Taoiseach, Tánaiste and Minister for housing promised 40,000 homes. The latest figures suggest actual completion figures for last year were under 30,000, which is below Government targets and 10,000 short of what the Taoiseach said would be built last year. This really matters. It matters to the 15,000 people in homelessness and to 25-year-olds around the country. We heard from our Deputy Eoghan Kenny, who is 24 and 70% of whose generation are living in their childhood bedrooms or living in their parents' homes. We all hear stories about three generations of families living in a two- or three-bedroom house, crammed in, unable to move on or move out because there is nowhere affordable to buy or rent in this country. The average rent in Dublin is €2,500 and house prices average €600,000 in Dublin. The Taoiseach offers us nothing in the Government countermotion today, nothing in the programme for Government and certainly nothing in the bland speeches delivered by junior Ministers today to indicate any change in housing policy.

What are we in Labour offering? We offer the Government a credible pathway for change, a State-led approach to intervention in the market. Of course we believe in private sector delivery too. If the Taoiseach read our manifesto, he would see we propose that half of houses built each year would be private delivery. We want to see combined and diversified delivery across different modes: through AHBs, through the private sector and, crucially, through a Land Development Agency that must be transformed to deliver at greater capacity on State-owned and private land. It must be transformed to deliver the social and affordable homes needed. The Taoiseach's party in the 1960s instituted a national building agency that delivered homes at scale. We can do that again but, unfortunately, the Government lacks the ambition and urgency to tackle this housing emergency.

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