Aideen Hayden (Labour) | Oireachtas source

In the long run, State boards will be the better as a result of this debacle. It is disingenuous of Fianna Fáil to throw muck about the appointment of people to State boards. Many of us on this side of the House could point to appointments to State boards made by Fianna Fáil.
As Senator Barrett pointed out, we seem to be in recovery regarding the housing market, as recent fiscal figures demonstrate. Again, I felt a certain sense of déjà vuwhen I heard the statements from the Construction Industry Federation, CIF, on our need to abandon Part V of the Planning and Development Act as soon as possible. The CIF proposes a 1% levy on all property purchases, to which I have no objection in principle as long as it assists people in need of social housing. However, the president of the CIF described Part V as a "boom-time tax". Let us be clear that it was a tax that was not paid. I did an analysis that showed 45,000 extra units would have been built for social and affordable housing had the previous Government enforced Part V. It did not, and as a result we have 26,000 fewer social housing units and I hazard a guess that with 26,000 additional social housing units, we would not be facing the homelessness crisis we do. Sometimes déjà vuis exactly that, same old, same old.