Deputy Mary Lou McDonald- speech from 24 Feb 2021

Thank you, Ceann Comhairle, Graeme Aagat. Teaseach, the lives of an entire generation have been defined by a housing crisis. It's a crisis that was created and worsened by bad Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael policy. And so many people now, for them the aspiration of purchasing or owning their own home has been reduced to a distant pipe dream. You know, Teaseach, that for years people have been calling out for a government that will take the housing crisis seriously and that will implement a plan that will once again make housing affordable for workers and families on average incomes. And when you took power last June, you claimed that you would be that government. You said that you would fix housing. You said that you would introduce a plan that makes an affordable home and achievable goal for ordinary people and families. And then your housing minister, Dara O'Brien, spent month upon month promising an affordable housing plan and we all waited and waited only to be extremely disappointed by what he wanted by what he and your government have produced and more than that to be actually very angry because the scheme that Minister O'Brien has come up with his shared equity scheme does absolutely nothing to make housing more affordable. In fact, it will achieve quite the opposite. His scheme will prop up already unaffordable prices and his scheme will make a bad situation so much worse. His policy could be described as both the continuation of disastrous Fine Gael housing policy, but also one that has strong echoes of the failed Celtic Tiger policies of your own party, Fianna Fáil. And it will have the effect of maintaining unaffordable prices and saddling working people with more unsustainable debt. Taoiseach, I have raised this issue with you before. I have said to you for some time that this plan is dangerous and I have advised you that it will not work. And of course, I have not been on my own. The Department of Public Expenditure and Reform, the Economic and Social Research Institute and indeed the Central Bank have all warned you and told you that your scheme will drive prices up. And now even the Fine Gael group of councillors on Dublin City Council have begun to see sense and have come out against this scheme. But it seems so far that just as in the bad old days when you were last in government Taoiseach, your minister seems intent on ploughing on regardless. And I have to say in the middle of a housing crisis, perhaps it is only a Fianna Fáil Minister for Housing that could even think of introducing a scheme that would inflate house prices and put money straight back into the pockets of developers, whilst bullishly ignoring warnings from senior government officials and for experts. So, the truth is this Taoiseach, your price inflating shared equity scheme was written and designed by property developers for property developers. And Taoiseach, when you were trying to make housing affordable, you shouldn't allow developers to call the tune because their job is to maximise profits for themselves and the job of government is to deliver affordable housing for ordinary citizens. But it seems that with Fianna Fáil back in charge of housing, property developers are back in control and ordinary people will literally pay the price for that. And if you persist with this lame duck scheme, home ownership will remain beyond the reach of those on modest incomes. So I want to ask you Taoiseach to scrap this scheme. Very clearly the deputies is engaging in a propagandistic sloganeering approach to housing. And as you know, in the recent budget, the government allocated unprecedented resources to a broad suite of measures to deal with the housing crisis. The largest social housing program was budgeted for 2021 in terms of public housing and social housing. Direct bills, approved housing bodies, and yet the deputy has consistently ignored the largest budget in history that has been provided for house building generally. And that is the reality and we had planned to build 9,500 social homes in 2021. Clearly, that would be the biggest amount in the history of the state, but clearly COVID-19 now and the current lockdown will impact on that. But we will try and recover ground as much as we possibly can. And I would say that the Fianna Fáil has been in government now for eight months. And in that period from the July stimulus on, we have made very rapid progress in relation to housing in terms of the Land and Development Agency Bill, for example, in terms of pulling that, getting real detailed work on that bill, which will be an extra lever when it is passed, to affect and give effect to the building of housing, both social and affordable in this country. And the Minister has published the Affordable Housing Bill on January the 20th. It delivers on the program for government to put affordability at the heart of the housing system. Our only interest is in giving young people a chance to buy houses. And at the moment, if you take last year, for example, the number of houses built was not sufficient to deal with the housing crisis. So this kind of branding and this kind of reference to developers and all that is just political propaganda. Because at the moment, we do not have the degree of activity either in the private sector that we should have, or indeed in the public sector that will pick up. The VODE's program alone was an immediate and effective piece of work that we undertook from July to the year, with nearly 2,500 houses returned for people to access in our country, which I think was evidence of a can-do approach to this. And we will use all measures to improve and enhance affordability, but also to get houses built, because ultimately we need to get more houses built. And that will take efforts in the private sector and in the public sector, and through approved housing values. And all the while focusing, of course, on the crisis of homelessness itself. Sinn Féin has consistently opposed home ownership. You have voted against our affordability motions. You have voted against the help to buy scheme. You are now against the equity scheme before it is even set up. It hasn't even been set up. It is nowhere near as dangerous as you are trying to indicate that it is. On Dublin City Council, Sinn Féin have voted against housing development motions, 16 out of 21 times. And it is time on those issues you got off the fence and started allowing housing schemes to start, and not allowing ideology and politics to get in the way of getting houses built. And I think there is too much of that going on, on Dublin City Council and elsewhere, in terms of very significant projects that could allow for affordable housing right now, before any scheme, if they were allowed to develop. But you have consistently opposed such schemes. And I think it really undermines the credibility of the proposition that you have made here this morning. My only interest, and the interest of the government, is to get as many houses built as we possibly can. We know we should be, according to the ESRI, building about 33,000 houses per annum, to deal with demand and to deal with the crisis that we have experienced now for the last number of years in the housing situation. And in addition to that, to create the capacity for people to be able to afford to buy houses. Deputy MacDonald. Deputy MacDonald. Thank you, Cian Córle. Well, Sinn Féin is for public housing and affordable housing. We are very, very clear on that, Taoiseach. And the evidence of your housing failures are there for all to see, and are very, very real. It is not propaganda. The suffering and the anger of workers, of families, of younger people in particular, who cannot afford a home, is real. It is not fiction. And the fact that your proposed shared equity loan scheme will prop up unaffordable prices, will line the pockets of developers and leave ordinary people out in the cold, is the simple, plain fact of the matter. And you can, you know, play whatever games you wish, Taoiseach, but people know that housing policy has been a disaster in the past on your watch. And we are watching now again Taoiseach while you make more disastrous decisions in slow motion. So I am asking you again to listen to the experts, to listen to common sense, and to ditch this lame duck scheme. Ditch it Taoiseach and do the right thing. The Government will start with a number of ladders in terms of creating opportunity for young people who are caught off, caught up and prioritised in a rip-off rental market. We want to liberate young people from that and give them opportunities to buy homes and to be in a position to afford houses that we will be built. And the new equity scheme is targeted and it's aimed to do that, along with the new affordable purchase scheme, with the State directly building affordable houses, that's for the proposal, and the retained and expanded head-to-buy scheme. So there's a suite of measures there. We also want to get people back on site putting bricks and mortar in the ground by tackling planning barriers. Irish water connection delays and additional capital money has gone into Irish water, for example, to get sites ready. That whole infrastructure piece is very important in enabling houses to be built. It needs, the housing crisis needs a broad range of measures to deal with it comprehensively and to really get to grips with it. Unfortunately, COVID-19 has intervened both last year and this year, but be in no doubt as to the Government's determination to do the right thing for people in terms of getting houses. Thank you very much, the time is up.