Séamus Healy (Tipperary South, Independent) | Oireachtas source

The devastating housing crisis is undermining the social fabric of Irish society. This housing disaster was created by the Bertie Ahern Government, which privatised social, affordable and public housing, and handed over the housing market to the profit motive of the private market and stopped local authorities building houses for 20 years. The result is the disaster we now have, and that disaster now looks like 15,000 families homeless including almost 5,000 children. There are 120,000 families on local authority waiting lists and HAP schemes. There are skyrocketing rents and almost half a million young people in their 30s and 40s living in their childhood bedrooms. It means thousands of families locked out of home ownership, either slightly over the local authority limit for the waiting list and not able to afford or to get a mortgage or condemned to pay huge rents and to poverty into the future. It means forced emigration with young people forced to emigrate to Australia, Canada and the United States of America.

It is shocking to see that the current Government is again placing housing at the mercy of the private market. That decision can only create additional misery into the future. The housing crisis is an emergency and needs to be dealt with as an emergency. As I have said before and will continue to say, we need a declaration of a housing emergency in law. What would that housing emergency do? It would oblige the State, in law, to deal with housing as the overriding priority, and it would oblige each Government Department, in law, to housing proof its policies and actions. It would freeze and reduce rents. It would allow local authorities to purchase vacant properties by agreement or compulsory purchase and refurbish those for people on the housing waiting list. It would require the sale of houses to provide for tenants in situ to remain as tenants and stop the drift into homelessness. It would stop the block purchase of houses and apartments by wealthy individuals, vulture funds and developers on a buy-to-let basis. This would stop these individuals and organisations competing with first-time buyers. This is generally thought of as a city problem, but I have lately come across it in the constituency in my own town of Cahir, where a small development has been purchased by an investor even though local families had already paid a deposit. An emergency would provide emergency funding for a massive programme of social and affordable housing by local authorities on public land.

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