Martin Kenny (Sligo-Leitrim, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the debate and wish both Ministers all the best in their new portfolios. However, one of the things that is very difficult to listen to from both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael is that they are the parties for homeownership. It is striking because since Fine Gael came into government almost 14 years ago, and was supported by Fianna Fáil over the past number of years, in every subsequent census homeownership in Ireland has declined. It has gone down and down and homelessness has increased and continues to increase.

We have three sectors in Ireland. One is the private market where homeownership is what we want to see with people being able to buy their homes and progress - but very few are. We also have social housing, which we do not have enough of anywhere in the country. We need to see thousands and thousands more houses built to have any hope of being able to break the back on this. The other sector we talk about, which was mentioned by several of the TDs opposite, was affordable rent, affordable purchase and affordable housing. The problem is that affordable housing is not available practically anywhere in the country outside of the capital city. Where it is available it is not affordable. It is as simple as that. We are talking about almost half a million euro for a house that is being called affordable. People need to wake up and recognise the policies the Government has had up to now have been a total and absolutely dismal failure.

I want to raise a number of specific issues because I think they are very important. First, is the renting of houses. There are many people on HAP and who are renting houses from local authorities and have had notices to quit and have to leave. The previous Government had a scheme where the local authority could buy these houses but they cannot do that now. When will this scheme be put back in place because there are loads of people in my constituency, including a nurse who has four small children, living in a house with a notice to quit? The local authority wants to buy the house but there is nothing there with which to do so.

The other issue I will mention is rural housing, which has been has been mentioned several times. I come from a part of the country where there is massive decline in the rural population. The population is going down and down and down every year and we need to be able to build rural housing. The guidelines in place are far too strict for people to be able to build houses in their own communities to sustain those communities and keep them going.

Finally, I will speak about Irish Water or Uisce Éireann. Uisce Éireann charges people for putting in water connections. If it is more than 10 m, that charge per metre is absolutely massive and is a deterrent for people to be able to build their own homes. There needs to be a review of that so people can get connections, particularly in rural areas where water connections may be for further distances than 10 m.

See this speech in context