Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein)

I read the Department's amendment this morning. There is nothing constructive about it. It is an absolute embarrassment because of what it says not just to Deputies in this Chamber but to the people experiencing the hard edge of the Government's failed housing policies, which is that nothing will change. It is more of the same failed policies into the future. Yesterday, the housing committee had a session on homelessness. Niall Muldoon, the Ombudsman for Children, spoke clearly about the catastrophic impact of homelessness on children. He expressed his office's exasperation at the failure of the Government to respond to the many constructive proposals his organisation and others have made. He also spoke about how this Government is continuously failing children. On Friday, we will have the latest homeless figures. I suspect once again that failure will be writ large. In the newspapers today, DNG reports the average price of a second-hand home in Dublin is now €600,000. We also read that the promised revised housing plan is delayed; what a surprise. That means local authorities still have not been given their revised housing targets and therefore cannot commence the process of considering the rezoning of land, nor have they be given revised social and affordable housing targets because six months in, this Government has not been able to agree them. The Department is slowing down approvals for much-needed social and affordable housing, collapsing questionable public-private partnerships. I have to laugh when I hear the Minister of State tell us the rural planning guidelines are under consideration. They were completed two years ago. The Minister of State's party and Fianna Fáil do not have the courage to publish them, put them out for public consultation and let us get on with providing clarity for people who want and need to live in rural Ireland. We have a Government with no urgency or ambition, which repeatedly says nobody on the Opposition side of the House has any alternative. I have one, a report commissioned by the Government, with 250 pages of alternatives, which it has ignored and thrown in the bin. I have another proposal from Sinn Féin, almost 200 pages of alternative housing policy, and other Members have provided others. There are plenty of alternatives but not the political will to accept the Government's problem is the policies it is implementing and the consequences for real people. Until the Government accepts the depth of its own policy failures, things will continue to get worse.

The Minister of State should not come in here and patronise us about being solutions-focused and constructive. For eight years I have stood here proposing alternatives, ignored by the Minister of State's predecessors and now by him. Until we see the radical reset of housing policy as outlined in the Government's commission's report, this crisis will continue to worsen.

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