Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein)

After months of delay, it is finally here. Almost a year into this Government, it is only now publishing its housing plan. Given the amount of time this has taken, we can be forgiven for expecting something bold and new, a plan, as the Tánaiste once said himself, to once and for all tackle the housing crisis. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Anyone who will take the time to read the plan will know the emperor has no clothes. In fact, this is not a new housing plan at all. It is nothing more than a reheating and repackaging of the failed housing plan of the last Government.

Today should have been a moment of hope for all those in need of affordable housing. Instead, it is another punch in the gut for all those without a home of their own. Once again, the Government is underestimating overall housing need and, as a result, the housing deficit will continue to grow. There is no increased funding or targets for the delivery of social homes. The result will be even longer council waiting lists and ever more adults and children experiencing homelessness. There is no increased funding or targets for the delivery of genuinely affordable homes. Instead, the Government is brazenly trying to rebrand unaffordable private homes as somehow affordable. There is also no plan to fix the Government's broken affordable housing schemes. This week, we learned so-called affordable apartments in O'Devaney Gardens in Dublin will cost €500,000. So-called affordable rental homes in the same development are expected to cost €1,900 a month. This is on land once owned by the council and gifted for free to a developer by the Tánaiste’s Government.

The Government's failure on affordable housing will mean that the locked-out generation will continue to be locked out, forced to choose between their parents’ box bedroom or emigration. The only promise the Government is keeping in this plan is its promise to attack renters. From March of next year, tens of thousands of renters will face even higher rip-off rents for the privilege of being forced to live in smaller and darker apartments. Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil’s housing policy was written by and for big investors and developers to benefit their private interests. The needs of ordinary people, workers and families have once again been ignored. For ten years, the Government has starved our councils of the resources and staff to deliver public housing on public land at scale, all the while showering investor funds, corporate landlords and big developers with subsidies and tax breaks like confetti. Today's plan does not move a single inch from that disastrous approach.

Despite what they are going to say on the radio and television, the Government’s backbenchers must be privately reeling. In fact, even the Minister for housing, Deputy James Browne, is not hanging around to defend his own plan. Instead of debating with Opposition spokespeople on television and radio this evening, he is fleeing the country to speak - believe it or not - at a housing conference in England.

It did not have to be this way. The Government could have taken on board the recommendations of its own Housing Commission or adopted the many solutions promised by Sinn Féin and others. It could have included actual, measurable targets year on year for all of its schemes, but why would it bother doing that when it knows already it is going to miss them? Instead, it has decided to do nothing different and nothing new. Given the Government's decade of failure, why should anyone believe anything is going to change now?

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