Rory Hearne (Dublin North-West, Social Democrats)

The Government talks about wanting to hear views and ideas from the Opposition, but its Ministers and TDs do not even bloody bother to turn up in the Dáil to listen. The Minister of State is the only one here. It is an absolute disgrace, but in some ways it is not surprising. It is just a continuation of the cynical and misleading actions of the Government during the election campaign.

The Government claimed it would build 40,000 homes. It never did. The Government knew it was misleading people. In their election manifestoes, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael failed to mention that their big, bold housing idea was to give billions to developers and investment funds. Would those parties have been elected to government if they had led with that in their housing plans? I do not believe so. We need to be straight up here. As I said last night, this budget did not come about on the basis of evidence or radical new ideas. It is like something that was conjured up during a seance at which the ghosts of Fianna Fáil and Fianna Gael's past were awoken to give advice on what to do. The Government resurrected Michael Lowry, and now it is resurrecting the failed ideas from the Celtic tiger of tax breaks for developers and investment funds.

The shocking and disgraceful thing about this budget is that while one in five of our children are living in poverty after their families pay for housing costs, each year the Government is going to give more than €500 million to global funds, developers and investment funds. It gets worse. Not one home buyer or renter will see any reduction in either the price of a house or the cost of rent as a result of the provision of this money. There is no affordability requirement. It is no wonder the Government voted down our developer profits transparency legislation. It did so because it does not want to know. This is a no-strings-attached policy of giving bags of cash to developers and investor funds and allowing them to do whatever they want with it. The Government does not care. There is an even bigger clanger. Developers are building apartments that will be completed today, tomorrow and in the coming two or three years. Work on those apartments is already in train. However, developers are going to get the hundreds of millions of euro via a VAT cut that is supposed to be an incentive to build. Those apartments were going to be built regardless of what the Government did with the VAT cut. However, the Government is giving out hundreds of millions of euro in any event in the form of a golden handshake. That is absolutely disgraceful; it is so frustrating.

The fact that homelessness was not mentioned once by either of the two Ministers with responsibility for housing is disgraceful and shameful. It is shameful that there is one child homeless in this country, but that there are more than 5,000 is an utter failure. It is an utter scandal, but the Government does not treat it as such. There is just a postscript whereby the Government says it will do something about homelessness. The only thing the Government did in respect of homelessness in the budget was to increase the amount of money going to emergency accommodation. It did so to cover the fact that so many people are being made homeless in this country every day because of failed policies. That is outrageous, and we will call it out and keep doing so.

The Government can blind itself with its own spin and delusion, but the fact is that the housing crisis is worse than ever. I will give another example of the spin and bluster in the Government's housing plan. It is a pity the Tánaiste headed off to wherever he was going and did not hang around to listen to the debate. He said that the budget allocation for the Department of housing will see significant increases for the delivery of starter and social homes. What are those significant increases? Ten thousand social homes was the Government's target last year. This year it is 10,200. The significant increase is 200 additional social homes. Come on; get real here. People are not being serious. It is the same with affordable purchase. The Government says it is going to build 7,500 affordable purchase and cost rental homes this year. A third of those are included under the vacant property grant. That is not affordable-purchase housing. It is time for serious politics involving serious ideas on housing. That is what we put forward in our alternative budget. It is an awful pity that Government Ministers and TDs did not bother to hang around to listen and engage in a serious debate.

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