Pádraig Rice (Cork South-Central, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I find it really hard to listen to the Government's rhetoric on housing. The Minister comes in here and talks about the progress the Government has made but homelessness has hit an all-time high. How is that in any sense progress? Rents and house prices are soaring, and schemes such as the help-to-buy scheme are just driving up house prices. The Government is failing people in this country every single day, yet its members come into the Dáil and state they are doing more than ever before. It is clearly not working.

Like my colleague, I wonder whether the Government members are meeting the same people I meet. Are they meeting the multigenerational families who are crammed into small houses? Not only are people stuck in childhood bedrooms but there are parents, children and grandchildren living together not out of choice but out of necessity. There are people sleeping in doorways and tents. There are people existing in emergency accommodation. I say “existing” because it is hard to have a life when you are stuck in homelessness. There are older people being given notices to quit and they have nowhere to go. There are people waiting for over a decade for social housing in Cork city, and young people emigrating because they have lost hope of ever owning a home in this country. These are the people I see and meet and who need solutions, not spin from the Government.

It is really frustrating that when we highlight these issues, we are told we do not have solutions. When we set out our solutions, the Government refuses to listen. Its members turns up late. Fine Gael members seem not to have turned up at all. Despite the Taoiseach having said yesterday he wants a debate on housing policy, the Government does not engage in it. All we get are spin and bluster.

We have set out in detail, in numerous documents, our solutions. I encourage the Minister to read them. We have detailed housing policies and he can have a read of them. We have also set out in detail, in this motion, some of the solutions. They include closing the loopholes that allow investor funds to avoid tax, increasing the stamp duty on bulk purchasing, accessing EU funding, providing early-stage finance to approved housing bodies and local authorities, and protecting renters by not removing rent pressure zones until there is an alternative in place. I believe these are the solutions. The solution is not more beds in sheds.

The key issue is really around affordability. Over the past five years, the Government has really failed to provide affordable housing. The few houses that were built under the Affordable Housing Act stretched the definition of affordability to breaking point. In my constituency, Cork South-Central, some of the houses cost over €400,000. On what planet is a house that costs over €400,000 affordable?

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