The housing crisis that has been the responsibility of Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and now the Independents in government is a crisis that is ripping apart the fabric of Irish society. Communities are suffering significantly across the country during this housing crisis. Obviously, those most affected are the 17,000 people who are currently homeless in this State. Thousands of other people are forced to stay in their families' box rooms just to survive. The GAA generation has been forced to emigrate, in large part. It is incredible that we have never had such a level of jobs but, at the same time, young people are being forced to emigrate. The birth rate is falling significantly as a result of many families putting off having children or not being able to have children at all. We see that in schools, with many not getting the necessary number of children into junior and senior infants. The housing crisis debate in this Chamber has been extremely limited for the past five years. It has been between a Government allergic to the building of public houses and an Opposition which has pretty much ignored the building of private houses. That limited debate has contributed to the severity of the housing crisis. We in Aontú believe a society needs to have both functioning properly in order to deliver housing. The Minister of State is shaking his head. A number of years ago, I rang Meath County Council to ask how many public houses were built in the State at that time. There were four in that year. For a decade, nearly a generation, Governments stopped building public houses in this State. We believe strongly a bird cannot fly on one wing. The solution needs to involve both delivering public housing and fixing the broken private housing system. The truth of the matter is that there is a number of significant barriers to young couples buying homes. Most of those barriers are in the gift of the Government. It is not rocket science. These barriers can be overcome. There is incompetence in the Government in terms of overcoming them at the moment. That is why it is so frustrating to see the damaging fallout from the housing crisis throughout society. The first issue is red tape and bureaucracy. For years, Governments have been layering red tape and bureaucracy onto the system. The Opposition, in the main, has been shouting for more. We are the slowest for planning, licensing, permitting, tendering and judicial review. Until a couple of months ago, nobody but Aontú was talking about this. The Government has started to talk about it recently. It is within the Government's ability to fix that issue and it has been refusing to fix it. We have the highest number of judicial reviews. The greater Dublin drainage project is an example. Some 100,000 homes depended on it and it was ten years caught up in the planning system. I know of planning applications 30,000 pages long, needing trucks or vans to bring them into a local authority, and of four separate formats for a planning application to deal with four separate agencies. That issue is the Government's fault. It has created it and allowed it to happen. The second issue is the lack of infrastructure. For at least ten years, this country was second from bottom in European terms for infrastructural spend - only Romania was worse. Uisce Éireann was before us in the committee recently. I asked its representatives when the gaps blocking the building of homes would be filled so homes could be built. They said it would take until 2050. There is a shocking lack of serviced zoned land in this country. Again, that is down to Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. The third barrier is viability. If we cannot make building a house viable, houses simply will not be built. Incredibly, 30 of the top 50 construction companies in this country are working abroad and sending their workers abroad because it is not viable to build in the Irish market. The RTB Bill was designed to make homebuilding more viable, for sure, by pushing up rents, but it put the pressure on the tenants to pay for that viability. We believe it should put the pressure on the taxpayer to pay for that viability. It reduced VAT on the building of apartments. Why does it not reduce VAT on the building of houses? The same logic is there, except the viability question comes into play for families rather than for investment funds. In other jurisdictions, such as the North of Ireland, there is no VAT on family homes. The Government should be looking at that issue. Those are three examples of the Government putting in place barriers to the building of homes. We have been stuck in this shocking, damaging, Groundhog Day conversation for the past ten years about Governments' inability to build the most important priority need that a family has, and that is a roof over their heads. My worry is we will be here in another five years having the same old staid conversation between the two ideologically opposed groups. Nobody can think creatively about removing the barriers facing young families in terms of housing.

Sentiment score: -0.14

You were actually willing to go with Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael - both parties. We refused to go in.

Sentiment score: 0.12