Dessie Ellis (Dublin North-West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

After two years of deliberations, the Housing Commission released its comprehensive report in 2024. The report contains 83 recommendations and hundreds of additional recommended actions that would be necessary to transform the housing landscape in Ireland. It is a significant report from a commission whose membership comprised academic experts, economists and business professionals, all of whom are experts on the housing sector in Ireland in their own right.

What is of great significance is that the commission did not only look at the housing policies and strategies of the previous Government; it looked at those of successive Governments over decades. The report is scathing in its criticism of successive Governments and outlines their ineffective decision-making and failure in the areas of housing policy and strategy. The latter all resulted in what the commission estimates, on the basis of the information in the 2022 census, as a deficit of between 212,500 and 256,000 homes in this country.

Sinn Féin has been saying much of this for years. We did not need the Housing Commission's report to tell us how badly the housing issue has been managed by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael over the years. In the run-up to the election in November, the Government misinformed the public by claiming that housing completions would reach 40,000. In fact, only just over 30,000 houses were completed. A construction consultancy group predicted that this year only in the region of 32,000 will be completed. If this level of stagnation is sustained, the Government's target of 300,000 houses completed by 2030 will be no more than a pipe dream. This can only change, as the Commission stated in its report, on foot of "a radical strategic reset of housing policy". This Government is devoid of innovative and radical ideas and relies too much on previous failed policies to make any substantial difference to increasing the housing stock in any meaningful way.

The report recommends a substantial increase in the proportion of social, affordable and cost-rental housing to meet the current needs. We need an aggressive approach to renovating and reintroducing into the housing stock the tens of thousands of vacant and derelict properties that can be brought back into use as viable accommodation. In my constituency of Dublin North-West, there are many vacant properties over shops and closed-up businesses that can be converted to increase the chronic housing shortage in my constituency and others.

Local authorities are waiting on approval to continue with the tenant in situ scheme.

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