Mary Fitzpatrick (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

It is an important point. When we are talking about housing, we are talking about people's homes. We are also talking about the provision of homes and the State taking a lead in the provision of social and affordable homes for our citizens. We are doing so in the context of a crisis. We are coming out of a decade of undersupply of housing. We are also doing it in the context of Covid, which led to a complete shutdown of construction. Amplifying that problem, much of our population has been displaced outside of the urban centres. The housing crisis has only intensified.

On the suggestion that leasing is bad value, let me say two things. I speak as someone who has spent time on a local authority and who has spent more than 15 years supporting people and helping them to avoid homelessness. Local authorities did not have the tools to provide affordable housing or 100% public housing on public land. This legislation and the Affordable Housing Bill 2021 are changing that. It will not change it for only the next five or 25 years, but for generations to come. Public houses will be built on public land and it is to be hoped that they will be there for 100 years or more.

In the here and now, we provide more than 70% of all of the emergency homeless accommodation in Dublin within my constituency. In this area, the Dublin Region Homeless Executive will pay twice as much for what I consider substandard emergency accommodation than what it would pay for a 25-year lease on a brand new, purpose-built home with an energy rating of A. In a human crisis, it would be negligent and abusive of any of us to tell the Dublin Region Homeless Executive or Dublin City Council not to lease those homes, to leave those people in that substandard emergency accommodation, not to let them move on with their lives and to traumatise them and their children because we have a principle of not leasing homes. That is what is being suggested here. I, for one, will not stand over that.