Voices from Ireland’s politics parties explain their housing plans.
With just days to go until the general election takes place, the JOE team have pulled together some of the leading voices within the political parties asking for your vote.
We asked them to explain in 60 seconds or less, their / their party’s plan for each of the most debated topics coming to the election.
The discussed topics include housing, immigration, cost of living, the Apple windfall, Palestine, and climate change.
In regards to housing, the candidates answered as follows:
Fianna Fáil – Micheál Martin
“Over the last number of years we’ve built the foundation stones to really drive housing, housebuilding into the future.
“When we began in government, 20,000 houses a year, now we’re at the high 30,000s a year. We want to get to 60,000, to investment in the Land Development Agency, to extending the Help to Buy Scheme and the First Home bridge the Gap Scheme to 2030. And that gives guarantees to first time buyers, 125,000 at least will be buying houses for the first time over the next number of years.
“We’re the one party that’s saying ‘keep those schemes going’, and what we’re basically saying is the foundation stones are there. Let’s get at it now, let’s build houses and let’s double output.”
Sinn Fein – Eoin Ó Broin
“Well, at the centre of Sinn Féin’s election campaign is a plan to make housing affordable and bring homeownership back into reach of working people.
“We have the most ambition public housing program proposed in the history of the state. Social, affordable rental and affordable purchase. But, we also want to protect renters and ensure that people who want to buy homes on the private market can do so at lower prices.
“Housing is the party’s number one priority and I’d urge people to go onto the website and look at our alternative housing plan, ‘A Home of Your Own’.”
Social Democrats – Gary Gannon
“The Social Democrats are committed to building 50,000 affordable housing a year. In order to do that we need to fund our approved housing bodies, we need zoned land to be affordable.
“We also need to tackle some of the crises you see around this city, like short-term lets taking up whole housing streets. Tackle the build to rents, you see big buildings going up the length and breadth of Dublin and the country but nobody can afford to live in them. That’s the soc dems commitment for this election.”
The Green Party – Neasa Hourigan
“The Green Party unashamedly believes that the resources of the state should be spent on social housing and cost rental housings. That is to say state-led housing that focuses on those who are in lower income and focuses particularly on having a roof over peoples heads rather than the acquisition of homes within the private sector.
“We think that we could get between 50 and 53,000 delivered every year, half of which would be social homes and cost rental, and very importantly for people like me in Dublin Central, bring 4,000 houses back from dereliction and vacancy.
“We’ve also seen up to 48,000 homes enjoy retrofit in 2023, for example. That’s up from 4,000 homes in 2020 which is a ten fold increase, and we think that in the next few years, that will be a huge focus for activity.”
Labour Party – Darragh Moriarty
“On housing, the Labour party is proposing a radical increase in ambition in the delivery of affordable, social and cost rental housing. This Government has dramatically failed to ratchet up its ambition. The housing targets aren’t ambitious enough and they’re failing to meet them.
“We called 18 months ago for housing targets to be upped to 50,000 a year, those need to be targeted at affordable, cost rental and social because housing at the moment is so far out of reach for ordinary working people, its knock on impacts are profound, it’s happening in education, happening in health, people can’t afford to live in this city because housing is too far out of reach for them.”
People before Profit – Paul Murphy
“The reason that we have a housing crisis is because Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have relied on the market to deliver housing. Basically their policies are about throwing money at private developers, giving tax breaks to landlords to try incentivise the market to work.
“All that has resulted in is a massive transfer of wealth from people who have no property or one property, to those who have loads of property. We need a fundamentally different approach based on state intervention, we need a state construction company to build 35,000 social and affordable homes a year combined with proper rent controls to bring rents down to an affordable level and a ban on no fault evictions.”
Independent – Clare Daly
“Successive governments have been completely going the wrong direction on housing. They’re using gifting state land to private developers to sell us unaffordable housing.
“We have to change tack, we need public housing on public land, we need to make the local authorities fit for purpose so that they’re the developer, cut out the middle-man or else you’ll never end the blight of unaffordability and the lack of adequate housing or decent rents for our citizens.”
JOE reached out to Fine Gael and Aontú for a representative, but they did not put anyone forward.
On top of these quickfire questions, we’ve sat down for a longer chat with each of these candidates – get the full interviews on our YouTube channel.
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