TD ALSO LASHES “THICK NEO-LIBERAL SKULLS” OF “JOHNNIE-COME- LATELY EXPERTS” ON CRISIS
In a statement, Richard Boyd Barrett TD, for People Before Profit Alliance, who has been warning for three years that a housing crisis was looming and who has raised it repeatedly in the Dail over that time, has described the latest government announcements on the crisis as “pathetic.” He described as “utterly disgraceful” the government’s refusal to raise the rent allowance caps as an emergency measure to deal with the crisis.
He was also severely critical of some the recent analysis and commentary by “economic” experts on the housing crisis.
Deputy Boyd Barrett said: “The government’s response is totally inadequate – we now have another “agency” to work with the myriad of existing agencies and an announcement of €35 million investment which was already announced three weeks ago.”
“The only way to deal in the short term with the current housing emergency is for the Minister to instruct Community Welfare Officers across the country to abandon the rent allowance caps policy, to introduce rent controls and to provide rent allowance support at a level that matched actual rent levels. The refusal of the government and particularly Minister’s Howlin and Burton to do this following today’s cabinet meeting is an utter disgrace and a recipe for turning a crisis into a total disaster.”
Deputy Boyd Barrett said also: “Local authorities must also immediately be given the resources to purchase or requisition and refurbish empty properties, whether they were NAMA properties, former Garda stations or empty council houses.
In the short term these are the only measures that will prevent a disaster unfolding.”
However, Deputy Boyd Barrett said also that both government and so-called “economic experts” were still failing to grasp the radical policy change that was needed to deal with the long-term problem of social housing and homelessness.
He said: “The urgently necessary short-term measures are not long-term solutions. Only an emergency and large-scale public housing programme of 10,000 council houses per year for five years will even begin to address the long-term housing crisis and prevent future property bubbles and the inevitable crash. If we don’t build or buy council houses, quite simply, there is no long-term solution to this crisis and it will get worse.
There is no indication that the government or even the ‘johnnie-come-lately’ economic ‘experts’ who have suddenly “discovered” the housing crisis over recent weeks have got this understanding into their thick neo-liberal skulls. Instead, unbelievably they are talking utter bilge about incentives for speculators and cutting building worker’s wages to boost the profit margin of private developers. Really, you could not make the stupidity of up!”
Deputy Boyd Barrett rubbished government claims that it could not afford a large-scale public housing programme:
“A major public housing programme would more than pay for itself over ten years with the savings on rent allowance and new rental revenue. For goodness sake, if we could build tens of thousands of council houses in the 40’s, 50’s, 60’ and 70’s when this country was a border-line third world country, we can certainly afford to do it now.
The real reason the government is refusing to directly provide public housing is that it would impact on the profits and asset values of large corporate property owners, such as banks, super-wealthy individuals and private investment funds.”