"Housing delivery is the number one priority for this Government." That is the opening line of the statement issued by the Taoiseach and the Tánaiste following the first meeting of the Cabinet committee on housing. From this meeting, they had promised a slate of new and dynamic ideas, they said, to tackle the housing crisis, but that has not materialised. In fact, they have brought nothing new at all. The truth is that the Government's housing plan is in freefall after its figure of 40,000 new homes for 2024 was discovered to be a work of fiction. Now the Government has this scattered, frantic, directionless approach where it is talking about everything but dealing with nothing. Just to remind the Taoiseach, we still have sky-high house prices - the CSO tells us €200,000 more expensive now than a decade ago. We still have rip-off rents and shocking levels of homelessness, and today a report reveals the extent to which international students are being pressurised for sex in return for rent-free housing, surely a new low. The Government proposes to end the rent pressure zones and proposes to reintroduce tax breaks for developers but it gives nothing on how the Government will deliver homes that working people can actually afford to buy or rent. After all the high-level meetings, its big centrepiece idea, it seems, is to relax planning rules to allow people to build cabins in the bottom of their gardens. Now, greater flexibility is needed in this, and we will work with the Minister to get the regulations in place. However, to cast this up as the solution to the housing crisis simply highlights just how broken and how failed the Government's response to the housing crisis is. Tinkering around at the edges does not cut it. We need a serious change of direction in housing policy, one in which the housing needs of ordinary people are prioritised and where affordability is tackled head-on. In O'Devaney Gardens, now called Montpelier, here in Dublin, the largest Government so-called affordable housing scheme in the State, we read this morning that a two-bedroom apartment in the development can cost anything up to €402,000. That is not affordable. It is certainly not the cost we should be getting from a Government-subsidised housing scheme. This was, remember, public land on which the State should have and could have developed genuinely affordable homes, but instead the Government forced Dublin City Council to hand it over to a private developer and now we have these prices that are out of reach for the vast majority of working people. The Taoiseach has stated that "everything is on the table" when it comes to housing, but in reality this is code for not having a clue what to do next. His so-called new Government has no new ideas and no coherent plan. Tá plean tithíochta an Rialtais ina phraiseach; mar sin, tá an cur chuige trína chéile. Níl tuairim ná freagra nua ar bith ag an Rialtas seo atá in ainm is a bheith nua, mar dhea. This Government is all over the place on housing. The big question now is when it will get its act together. When will it bring forward new ideas and solutions to this crisis?
Sentiment score: -0.04
I can only surmise that the Taoiseach wishes to deflect and comment on Sinn Féin's policies because he knows he has been caught out. He has been found out. He spoofed during the election campaign. He presented a work of fiction. It was fact flexibility from Fianna Fáil. What a novel thing - not. Now he is in the hot seat again and there is an expectation of delivery and he is showing no serious intent, much less any capacity, to actually deliver the affordable homes that working people require at scale, and no real interest in taming runaway rents - far from it. He is quite happy to listen to his lobbyist friends and all of his old party political mates who now find themselves in other places of influence.
Sentiment score: 0.19
The Government has missed social and affordable housing targets every single year on the Taoiseach's watch and the typical home, as I told him, is €200,000 more expensive than it was over a decade ago.
Sentiment score: -0.30
The Taoiseach claims progress but the residential property price index demonstrates-----
Sentiment score: 0.23
-----prices are up by 8.7% in the last 12 months.
Sentiment score: 0.00
You are failing, Taoiseach. Why do you not just stand up and accept that fact?
Sentiment score: -0.06
Who is in government?
Sentiment score: 0.00
How long is the Taoiseach in government?
Sentiment score: 0.00