Annie Hoey (Labour) | Oireachtas source

As where I currently live, Ballymun, was mentioned, I might take a moment to talk about Ballymun and some of the experience of living there. The plaza redevelopment was supposed to be done outside the Axis centre but a council spokesperson said the redevelopment of the plaza will not commence until the completion of the Kildonan Park project. I do not understand why the two projects cannot happen alongside each other. It has been mentioned already in the House that there is a desperate need for rejuvenation and revitalisation of the area. Based on the projections we were looking at and with the funding that has been allocated to the project, it is unlikely that anything is going to happen in that plaza until 2025.

There is also land for 2,000 new homes in Ballymun. A colleague of the Minister’s, before entering the Dáil as a Deputy, spent many years slamming the Government for doing nothing about that land for 2,000 houses. I scanned through the information and found there are umpteen press releases on it, yet it has been three years and nothing has been done with that land for 2,000 houses. That is a whopping number of houses and could make a really big difference but as far as I can tell, nothing is going to be built before 2025.

I got involved in politics because my friends, my compadres, my colleagues and I lived through the recession. It was like going from technicolour to black-and-white and then back out again. We came through that, we went through college and we moved away. I have friends who left during the recession, who moved back and who were living on my couch last summer. I have friends in their 30s who were living on my couch because they could not get anywhere to live, and that is before an eviction ban came or went, or did anything else. The eviction ban was never meant to be a silver bullet. It was supposed to be an extension just to give the Government a bit of breathing space to build more social and affordable homes, and do something with the 166,000 vacant homes that were mentioned.