Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein)

The definition of "madness" is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result and that is exactly what the Minister is doing with this so-called plan. It is not a new plan and anybody with a shred of honesty who has read it would say that plainly. It is the same old failed policies repackaged, rebranded and re-presented one more time but this time with far less feeling. In fact, the only changes in this document from those of the Minister’s predecessors are the reintroduction of policies from a previous plan that failed back then and without doubt are going to fail now.

Let me run through some of the problems. The first and most fundamental is once again the Government is underestimating overall housing need. It is ignoring the Housing Commission’s estimation of the housing deficit, the amount of homes that are needed to meet housing demand right now, by a factor of about 20%. That is why the Department of Finance has said that even if the Government meets these targets, the housing crisis will continue for another decade and a half. Within that, the Government is chronically under-providing new social homes by a factor of about 30%. We need more than 90,000 new-build social homes over the next six years but we also need far more funding for the regeneration and improvement of existing social homes and a far more ambitious programme of social housing acquisitions. None of that is in this plan. Despite the Minister’s commitment to working towards ending long-term homelessness by 2030 – I always thought the Lisbon declaration was to end long-term homelessness by 2030 – there is not a single new measure in this plan across its 100 pages to prevent homelessness or accelerate people’s exits from homelessness.

Every time I hear the Minister, who normally is very cautious in his choice of language, talk about waging a war on dereliction, I am quite embarrassed for him because there is no urgency in tackling vacancy and dereliction in this plan. Transferring responsibility for the derelict sites levy to Revenue, which may collect it by 2027 is not a war; it is a snail’s crawl in tackling one of the most urgent and pressing issues of our time. Crucially, for all the Minister’s talk about private sector supply, new measures for the small and medium-sized builder-developer sector to build good-quality homes for working people to buy in every county are entirely absent from the plan. The only changes the Minister is proposing are the changes well announced to the private rental sector – reintroducing inferior design standards for apartments to make them smaller and darker; a €640 million tax break to apartment developers where the apartments are viable, being built and, in most cases, already have buyers; and legislation trundling its way through pre-legislative scrutiny of which the primary, if not sole purpose, is to jack up rip-off rents even higher from next March. Yesterday during pre-legislative scrutiny, the Bill was described by one stakeholder as "a jungle of confusion". I could not have found better words. It contains three new rules for rent setting and three new rules for security of tenure, and the only thing we are sure of is not increased supply, but ever greater rip-off rents and confusing and unenforceable tenure changes.

Of course the Minister knows it does not have to be this way. His party leader - sometimes I think the man who is actually in charge of housing - the Taoiseach stood in this Dáil only a week ago and complained about the Opposition and said that we had no alternative and no detailed plans. He must have missed the Government’s own Housing Commission report with over 200 pages of detailed recommendations being thrown in the bin and ignored by the Minister and his predecessor. The Opposition, including ourselves with a fully costed housing plan, over and over again has set out exactly how it can be done. Unless there is greater State intervention and the right kind of private sector supply to meet the needs of buyers, we are not going to get to a situation where all of those people who have been failed by the Government’s housing policies get access to secure, adequate and affordable homes. As long as that is the case, we will continue to campaign, to highlight and to critique but crucially to set out the alternatives because the only thing that is certain is this: this plan will come and go like Deputy Darragh O’Brien’s, Eoghan Murphy’s and Simon Coveney’s before it. It will fail and the losers will be people in need of affordable housing. On that basis, we will continue to oppose the plan because it is part of the problem and not part of the solution.

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