Liam Quaide (Cork East, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

The Social Democrats are introducing this motion on addressing the housing disaster at a time when the Government is clearly at an ideological loss. Its policies of incentives for developers and investments for vulture funds, and their inflationary demand-side measures, have failed to move the dial on the housing disaster. More people are homeless today than ever before and the Government is falling significantly short of its own housing targets, delivering fewer homes in 2024 than in the previous year. The private sector is not able to meet the targets set out in the Government's own strategies. Now it seems that the Government is going to double down on this failure with measures that will deepen the crisis further. We are now entering a phase in Irish society where spiralling homelessness is in danger of becoming normalised and the social divisions that spring from extreme inequality are becoming entrenched. We are also facing the appalling vista of adverse developmental and mental health outcomes for many of the people, particularly children, who are caught up in prolonged homelessness.

The Taoiseach is feeling emboldened by his majority in government to push ahead with policies that he would dare not mention in the lead-up to the general election. Once more, as with the Occupied Territories Bill, voters were misled. A strong Opposition pushback against this slide into gross inequality and corrosive social division is signalled by the Social Democrats' Private Members' motion today. We are calling on the Government to move away from introducing more tax breaks for developers and vulture funds, and towards accessing currently underutilised funding sources at the EU level, such as InvestEU and the European Regional Development Fund. We should be emulating good practice in other EU countries, such as Austria, which has achieved a fairer and more sustainable housing system. One of the measures we are proposing is the leveraging of Irish household savings to invest in affordable housing, similar to the French Livret A model. Under this model, households can put their money into a special State-backed savings account which offers a more attractive interest rate than other savings accounts. Those savings, in turn, are managed by a special State investment vehicle whose specific purpose is to finance infrastructure and social projects. The largest recipient of funding in France is the social housing sector. Households make a return on their savings and the social housing sector gains access to reliable capital at a reasonable rate.

We also need to provide increased and early-stage finance to approved housing bodies and local authorities.

Doing so will greatly increase the supply of actually affordable homes for rent and purchase. I call on the Government to reconsider its "Reeling in the Years" nostalgia trip into the Celtic tiger era and take on board the substantive proposals brought forward by the Social Democrats this morning.

See this speech in context