Denise Mitchell (Dublin Bay North, Sinn Fein)

We did not just wake up in this housing crisis; it has been going on for decades. We have seen plan after plan. Does the Minister remember rebuilding Ireland? That failed. Now we have Housing for All. In the meantime, and while this plan is going on, we have longer housing lists, people waiting to be housed, more unaffordable housing and record homelessness. Like many people outside the gate tonight, I am sick and tired of listening to the Government blame everybody else; it is always everybody else's fault. The Government is in charge in this State and has continued to underfund local authority housing departments which then cannot deliver housing. The Government decided in recent months to delay funds and restrict access to the tenant in situ scheme, throwing renters under the bus. That is before we come to its new announcement on rents, which is all over the shop. We all know this will do one thing: make rents go up.

This is not about opposition for the sake of opposition. For our part, we publish policy after policy of what we believe would solve this crisis. The Government does not agree with us and that is fine. It will have to stand over the decisions it makes. The one thing I will say - and it pains me listening to it from the Government - is that nobody expects this crisis to be fixed overnight but this has been going on year after year and we must call it out. It is a direct result of the Minister's Government's poor policy, reliance on private developers and now its inability to react. People need to stand up and call a stop.

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