Rebecca Moynihan (Labour) | Oireachtas source

I support this amendment. Again, it goes to the heart of the problem. The skeleton of the Bill is that affordability is not actually affordability. It is below market value. Market value can mean anything. Senator Warfield spoke about a house in Inchicore. Another house in Inchicore was on the market for €475,000. I think the bidding is now up around €670,000 and is still going.

I wish to address what Senator Fitzpatrick said about the Labour Party abolishing affordable housing. The Labour Party came into government in 2011 after Fianna Fáil with their developer friends over the previous ten years not only took down the construction industry but also the banking industry and nearly took the country with it. The affordable housing scheme that was in place left people paying mortgages that they suddenly could not afford because they were out of work and paying rents to the local authority that they could not afford because they were out of work. The 20% that was introduced in 2013 was because we were not building anything and it went from 20% of land to 10% of what was built so I will not take lectures, a few of which I have heard from a few Fianna Fáil people. I heard it from Senator Chambers as well.They need to take a hard look at what they did to the construction industry and to the people still in negative equity because of the prices they paid for houses at the end of the 2000s. They would want to be very careful in their mud-slinging about what people did at certain times when it comes to housing in this country.