Jim Walsh (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I ask the Leader to consider conveying to the Government the two great lessons of digging. The first is that when one is in a political hole the best thing to do is to stop digging. Unfortunately, we saw the debacle last week initiated by the Taoiseach but carried on by his Minister for Finance, by the Tánaiste, and now by the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform. The public have seen through this. While spin may have got the Government through its first few years in office, it is obvious now that the public have seen through it. It has worn thin. Unless they cop on to that, the Government is on a very short leash indeed.

I suggest that the second lesson is the one raised by Senator Hayden. We have seen a complete lack of a housing policy from this Government, which is now in its fourth year in office. The number of homeless people has grown significantly. The number of people on waiting lists in every council area has increased enormously and very worryingly. There is no coherent policy to tackle these issues. We have a situation now in which people in the public service are advising those who are young that they should not aspire to owning their own homes. In very difficult times back in the 1930s, more difficult than today, we had a good policy under a Fianna Fáil-led Government. Much of the local authority housing stock was constructed throughout the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s when there was real economic hardship. Many of the people who occupied those houses could never have aspired to owning their own homes in those days but subsequently, through tenant purchase schemes, they were able to achieve that. Many of them moved on to take up other schemes and moved into private housing. We need to get back and start digging foundations for new houses. It is not only the Minister of State with responsibility for housing, Deputy Jan O'Sullivan, who should take the blame. The Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform, Deputy Brendan Howlin, is extremely culpable in this regard. He was the one who cut public capital expenditure as a softer option instead of dealing with the overspend in current expenditure.

That has led to a situation where in the past few years when we could have invested in the construction of a housing programme which would have provided jobs for those who needed them in the industry at the time, we would now be dealing with what has become a crisis. I join with Senator Hayden in calling for an urgent debate in this regard.