Rebecca Moynihan (Labour) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister for coming to the House. I will address some of the issues around the much lauded largest ever investment in housing. The pandemic has exposed the cost of our broken housing system. We see people in low-paid jobs not just sharing rooms but hot bedding, renters being evicted and the crisis in social housing and homelessness continuing. The spin is that this is the largest investment ever in housing but when one drills down into it, the detail shows little progress. Anybody at the coalface of the housing crisis will get little relief from what was announced yesterday.

It is clear that there is nothing in the budget that will address the underlying causes of the housing crisis. Extra funding for homelessness was welcome but without radical State building, it will not address the root of the problem and Housing First should be the strategy when it comes to addressing homelessness. Our two-tier system will continue unless the State finally stops relying on the private market and on developer-led planning. The much lauded increase in capital spending will only add 593 direct build houses to the Rebuilding Ireland housing stock targets for 2021. There is no mention of the 7,000 houses that have not been built this year because of the impact of Covid-19. That is not nearly enough to make a dent in the 50,000 houses over five years that we were promised in the programme for Government and it is a lot less than the 80,000 we need at a minimum.

Following the loss of thousands of jobs since March, the ending of the eviction ban and the imposition of level 3 travel restrictions, there is nothing in this package for renters. The Government continues to pretend there is not a crisis in the private rented sector and that there is not a looming rental arrears crisis. Perhaps the most telling part of the budget for me is the so called affordable housing package of €110 million. When I saw that yesterday, I wondered who wrote the housing section of this budget and who had the audacity to call it the affordable housing section. It looks like we are back to the days of the construction industry setting housing policy for us. The shared equity scheme has been promoted in its pre-budget submission by the Irish Home Builders Association, which is a subgroup and an offshoot of the Construction Industry Federation. The so-called affordable measures of a shared equity scheme and the insistence on continuing the help-to-buy scheme at the inflated grant level of €30,000 will simply drive up prices for young people, while padding the pockets of developers.

Fianna Fáil in government has not reversed the disastrous policies of Fine Gael but it has added to our problems through its insistence on shovelling money to developers through the so-called affordable housing plans and the help-to-buy scheme.