Ivana Bacik (Dublin Bay South, Labour)

The Government finally published its long overdue housing plan last week. After all the anticipation, what it delivered was nothing more than old milk in new bottles. There was nothing new on affordable homeownership, no clarity on what new powers the Land Development Agency will have and no ambition on social housing. It is just an open door for speculators and land hoarders. Worse again, the Government has abandoned annual targets for new home building. Could there be a more blatant admission of failure than that?

The Government has also essentially confessed to the locked-out generation that it has truly run out of ideas, simply telling them to hang in there while removing the very tools needed to measure progress. It does not take a genius to understand why. When you scrap metrics, you scrap accountability. Worst of all, the Taoiseach's Government has normalised the eviction of children, at a time more than 5,000 children are without a home. This a national disgrace and the Government's housing plan is a disgrace.

People can see the Government has no real plan for housing. It is forming policy on the hoof, so it is no wonder its policies do not work. Let us take its recent plans to rip up minimum apartment standards and gut planning rules less than a year after the then Minister for housing, Deputy O'Brien, passed what he called "a comprehensive planning law".

On a random Sunday last July, the Government leaked to the papers new plans to make homes smaller by drastically cutting planning standards. There is nothing wrong with trying new things and, indeed, each week the Labour Party and others urge the Government to change its housing policies, but not like this because the Government tried this move before and it was a disaster then. If we cast our minds back to 2018, the then Fine Gael housing Minister, Eoghan Murphy, introduced similar plans to reduce standards and a regulatory mess ensued. Indeed, it was a mess that forced one of his successors, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, to amend apartment design rules again.

Why does the Government opt to repeat the mistakes of the past and, worse, to do more than merely repeating them? The current Minister for housing, Deputy Browne has sought to introduce a wrong-headed change without the required strategic environmental assessment.

Relaxing minimum housing standards was not in Fianna Fáil nor Fine Gael's election manifestos last year That is no wonder because if it was, they would have spent the election campaign explaining why people should look for a return to shoe boxes and grotty bedsits. They would have faced the same critique they are getting now from the Irish Planning Institute. Instead of announcing it, the two parties kept it quiet and ran on falsely inflated home building projections.

When the Government leaked those plans on a Sunday last July, the Cabinet agreed it by the following Tuesday and councillors justifiably brought a legal challenge to its hasty change. The Government lashed out. The Taoiseach and the Tánaiste attacked me and the Labour Party's housing spokesperson, Deputy Conor Sheehan, and accused our party of weaponising the courts because our councillor, Darragh Moriarty, was one of the councillors involved.

The Government then backed down in the courts on Monday of this week. It was a dramatic climbdown. This was a significant development that shows that there is no strategy and that no strategy underlies this change. It just an admission of failure. Does the Taoiseach admit that the Government's housing policies are failing, its attempt to reduce apartment standards has failed and its new housing plan is a further admission of failure?

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