Deputy Mary Lou McDonald- speech from 21 Apr 2021

Graemeagat, and I would like this morning, this afternoon to raise again the issue of housing I'm very conscious that as we now meet I suppose the light at the end of the tunnel gets a little bit brighter for people and we're now beginning to consider what life and what Ireland will look like once the pandemic passes and once the public emergency is over I think it's very encouraging that despite everything that people have been through in the last year that people still have that sense of hope and that sense of appetite for a better and a fairer Ireland Long before the Covid emergency people faced very many profound crises because of bad politics and bad government and many of these crises deepened during the course of the pandemic but the one that really stands out is the housing emergency is the housing emergency that I suppose alongside the mental health emergency which colleagues have discussed this morning and when Dutisha came to office he said that his government would fix housing he came to office on the back of an election campaign that was very heavily focused on the housing crisis but since coming to office what we have seen is more of the same persisting still with the same kind of developer-led policies that created the mess that we have in the first place and I believe that any claim of progress that might be made by government or by the Taoiseach is now cruelly exposed by the shocking number of tents that we see around the city centre of Dublin Dublin and the heart-wrenching image that we have seen again of a four-year-old child sitting on a crate here in the capital city eating her dinner on the side of the street It is not the first time that we have seen a child eating their dinner in similar circumstances and this I suppose is the sharpest edge of bad policy and of bad government which has seen house prices go up and up indeed the CSO tell us that house prices in Dublin have increased by a staggering 96% in the last nine years and these aren't mansions by the way these are modest family homes and meanwhile extortionate rents continue to soar in fact rents are so high that many first-time buyers struggle to save a deposit and how on earth could you could any person save for a deposit when your rent is 2,000 euro or more a month so it's a nightmarish trap that people find themselves caught in and as a result an entire generation is locked out of owning their own home this generation has had to put their lives on hold they've had to curtail their aspirations because government continues to choose policies that make the situation worse and here's perhaps the most frustrating aspect of things it doesn't have to be this way we need to build affordable housing that people can actually afford that means the state leading from the front it means direct investment and it means dropping the developer-led approach that for example is still in evidence in your shared equity scheme we need to intervene on behalf of renters we have to ensure that evictions remain banned for the foreseeable future but above all we need to ensure that rents are cut and that increases in rents are banned and I want to ask you this afternoon Taoiseach to guarantee and to offer to work with the rest of us to ensure that we see a cut in rents and that we see any increase in rents to be banned rents need to be frozen Thank you very much Deputy First of all I would have to disagree with the Deputy's presentation of the issue and to say at the outset that Fianna Fáil has been in government now for 10 months in a coalition government with the Fine Gael party and the Green party we having been out of government for 10 years and we have made housing a major priority of government with our colleagues and Dara O'Brien as Minister for Housing has applied great energy on a range of measures designed to deal with the housing issue to deal with homelessness and that image of Fáil is a very upsetting one but progress has been made in relation to homelessness in the last 10 months and the family homelessness has declined by about 42% homelessness overall by 19% but more needs to be done progress has been made in relation to homelessness but we are determined to do more and to expand the Housing First programme which has been effective in terms of reducing homelessness and particularly for single adults in particular and that is something that the Minister is very very focused on we want to create opportunities for people to own their own homes we want to create opportunities also for people to get faster access to social housing and the State taking a key role in building and facilitating the building of social houses and 3.3 billion was allocated in the Budget unprecedented some money to make sure that we can start to build the largest social housing programme in the history of the State and over the lifetime of the Government resulting in 50,000 new social houses being built we have been hit in the first three months of the year which the Deputy hasn't acknowledged we had to shut down construction significantly because of COVID-19 and the third wave we did allow some of social housing to stay open to complete projects but we are very very determined in respect of the social housing agenda in terms of building 12,750 new social houses this year that was the target prior to the shutting down of construction for the first three months of the year nine and a half thousand of those were new build homes and we are committed and we will do everything we can to accelerate that and we are going to look at a void programme again this year like we did last year which as soon as we came into office we went straight at it and got close to 2,500 houses back into use through allocation of funding to local authorities for the voids and the new equity scheme we talked about will help 2,000 people to be in a position to buy their own homes this year if we can get that through with the legislation a new affordable purchase scheme with the state directly building affordable homes is another key initiative to help people to buy their own homes a retained and expanded help to buy scheme I mean the deputy talks about giving people the opportunity to own their own homes and to aspire to that but yet you opposed that help to buy scheme and you've opposed and you continue to oppose the shared equity scheme the shared equity scheme and you make it you make claims in relation to it that are completely exaggerated in terms of its impact and the launch of the land development agency is a very important part of policy as well and the new cost rental scheme that the minister has introduced which will create wider options for people this year in relation to the rental area and we want to expand that expand that sorry very very significantly so there is a very comprehensive programme here unprecedented in scale no shortage of resources being allocated to this across all strands of the housing area and I would just say to appeal to the deputy you know that on the various local authorities where her party members are represented please stop opposing housing projects let's have a consensus across all the parties in the house that we facilitate projects now and get them going because that's the that is important in terms of giving people opportunities there's no point in standing up here in this house and saying we want people to have an opportunity to own homes and get access to social housing if projects are delayed and delayed and delayed and opposed and opposed and opposed and nothing gets built Thank you Taoiseach where projects are shovel ready that really is a disservice to people Thank you Deputy MacDonald You don't have to walk very far from here to see the scourge of homelessness in this city of Dublin indeed you can go into any of our cities our towns right across the country and you see that this is a reality rents are sky high and housing is unaffordable particularly to younger people and to people on average or lower wages and you were in government ten years ago Taoiseach and when you were in government you and the administration of the time wrecked the housing market you created a property bubble that burst and that devastated this country at that time and ten years later we see history repeating itself yes developers are taken care of landlords are taken care of but younger people people on low incomes all left behind and home ownership remains beyond their reach and rents are crucifyingly high so I want to ask you again do you accept that rents are too high do you accept that they need to come down and will you build a consensus with us and will you act to ensure that we have rents cut and that we ban any rent increase there are straight questions for you Taoiseach thank you very much I put straight questions to you why do you continue to oppose housing projects why do you continue to oppose schemes and initiatives that would give young people an opportunity to own their own homes you keep on opposing such initiatives undermining them all of the time there is complete incoherence and inconsistency in your approach to housing you ignore the fact that this year the allocation for social housing is the largest ever over 3.3 billion has been allocated to housing this year with a suite of measures been introduced and homelessness is a priority for this government and the number of people in emergency accommodation has fallen by 19% in the past year and 42% in terms of the number in family homelessness has decreased by almost 42% now we need to do more and homelessness is a blight on society and we need more supply and we need to match urgency of action with the rhetoric that we consistently hear and I don't think at times your party matches urgency of action with rhetoric when it comes to getting housing projects after ground thank you very much thank you very much why you are coming to the store the asset that you'll need and we need to replace that 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