Housing crisis at Fine Gael’s door says Munster
IMELDA MUNSTER LAYS BLAME FIRMLY ON THE GOVERNMENT
LOUTH TD Imelda Munster says Budget 2019 is ‘further proof that the government is hiding from the housing crisis that has been created by seven years of Fine Gael-led government policy’.
In her own words, here she outlines where she feels the government is currently letting down Irish citizens with this urgent issue;
“Make no mistake, the current housing crisis is Fine Gael policy because year after year, Budget after Budget, they prioritise the rich, the banks, and big business at the expense of the ordinary person.
This Budget shows us that the government has yet to face up to the housing crisis, despite recent protests and a Sinn Féin motion of no confidence in Minister for Housing Eoghan Murphy.
Fine Gael continues to hand over responsibility to private developers because as rightwing conservatives, they are ideologically opposed to the provision of social housing, preferring instead to put forward policies that cause misery and hardship for tens of thousands of our citizens.
The solution to the housing crisis is not rocket science.
Sinn Féin has put forward a suite of measures in our Alternative Budget which would go some way to alleviating the emergency.
These measures include doubling capital investment in public housing to €2.3billion to deliver 14,890 homes, a redress scheme for defective Celtic Tiger homes, and a 25% increase in Housing Adaptation Grants.
In Louth, we have over 50 acres of council-owned land banks.
This should mean that Louth has the capacity for 1,000 new social and affordable houses. Instead, the government has created yet another quango, the Land Development Agency, which will aim to deliver only 100 social houses, and 300 affordable houses, which may or may not prove to be affordable to average workers.
This government’s solution is to deprive Louth of 600 social and affordable houses at a time when we have over 4000 households on the housing waiting list.
It is obvious that Fine Gael and their partners in government Fianna Fáil have no interest in solving this crisis.
Their only solution is tax breaks and incentives for landlords and developers, which won’t help people on the housing list, or people who can’t afford to buy their own homes.
The only solution is a government that favours a state-wide social and affordable housing building programme as proposed by Sinn Féin.”