Lynn Boylan (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

We desperately want to solve this housing crisis. I did not interrupt the Senator and I would appreciate the same respect from that side of the House.

This Government has failed. It has failed on the housing crisis. Despite all the rhetoric it brings here, the truth is it has failed. The Minister has missed every deadline he has set. He said he would have an affordable housing Bill in September. Then it was the budget and then it was the new year. Weekend after weekend we see more infuriating stories about home buyers being locked out of ownership. Members talk about ownership, but this is thanks to the Fine Gael policy of throwing the doors wide open to the wrong kinds of investment funds. It rolled out the red carpet for the vultures, just as it rolled out the red carpet for Donald Trump. We learned on Sunday from the Business Postthat not only is the Government supporting these funds through an unfair tax policy but also taxpayer money is being used to assist in the funds buying up the homes. This comes as another slap on the face for anybody who is trying to buy a house, who is playing by the rules, who is paying sky-high rents or who is living with family and trying to save a deposit. It truly shows where this Government's priorities lie.

Public money should not be used to facilitate the mass purchase of homes. It should be used to deliver genuinely affordable purchase and affordable cost rental homes. The Bill before us has been a long time coming. My colleague, Senator Warfield, has outlined some of our party's concerns, but none more so than the now infamous affordable purchase shared equity scheme. This €75 million scheme, which will be doubled to €150 million if the banks get approval to join in, is, we are told, a small part of the Bill. However, it is the highest amount of money. It is higher than the other two schemes. The Minister's determination to plough ahead with the scheme, regardless of the expert views of the Economic and Social Research Institute, ESRI, the Department of Finance and the Central Bank, is breathtaking arrogance. This scheme was not in the Fianna Fáil general election manifesto. It was not in the programme for Government either. We know where it was. It was in the papers of lobbyists of Property Industry Ireland and Irish Institutional Property, which sold their wares to a Minister who could not come up with his own plan. It is a return to the Fianna Fáil style of reckless developer-led housing policy.

This scheme will not make homes more affordable. It will lock in high housing costs and saddle people with more debt. The Minister claims a similar scheme in Britain led to a 14% increase in supply. It did. It was a 14% increase in supply where it was not needed. It has echoes of the Fianna Fáil Celtic tiger ghost estates. The Minister also says prices only increased by 1% in a similar scheme. This is a lie. That 1% did not relate to price inflation. The only detailed analysis of this scheme was carried out by the London School of Economics and Political Science-----