Affordable Housing Vital in Dublin South

SPEECH TO LABOUR PARTY CONFERENCE, APRIL 2006. THE HELIX

I don’t need to rehearse for anyone the story of what has happened to house prices in Ireland over the past decade. Nor do I have to explain in any detail the consequences for real people of escalating house prices.

For years, young couples have been finding it harder and harder to afford their own homes. Hard working people are being compelled to move further and further out from the city in which they work to find a place to live. Not through choice, but through compulsion, they have developed a long-distance commuting life style, with all the strain that places on family life.

The people who take the early bus. The people who spend hours every day in their cars. The people who are put to the pin of their collar to make their lives function, particularly when they have children.

Many of these families now find themselves living long distances from the communities where they grew up, and the support of family and friends.

In my constituency of Dublin South, many young people find it almost impossible to find a home where they want to live – in the community where they were brought up. Why should it be ordained that you can grow up in Dundrum or Knocklyon, go to school in Ballinteer or Rathfarnham, but you can’t live in any of those places because you can’t afford to buy your own home.

Lets be clear. This is not some inevitable fact of life. It is a complete failure of Government . Fianna Fáil and the PDs have never seriously addressed this issue because they never seriously cared.

They have completely failed to control the cost of building land, but have allowed the limited stock of this vital resource to be left in the hands of a very few wealthy speculators.

They refused to implement the proposals contained in the Kenny report, or any version of them, to keep down the cost of land that is rezoned.

They have not delivered on the provisions of Part 5, which would have made land available for affordable houses.

And they have allowed builders and developers to buy their way out of their obligations to the loss of young familes trying to get their first home.

They promised 40,000 affordable houses, including 10,000 under social partnership. They have delivered 2000. They are so out of touch from the real needs of hard working families that they do not even seek to defend their record in this area- and if only the delivery of affordable houses grew at the same rate as their arrogance, then things would be much better for all our communities.

Good housing policy and good planning policy go together. We need to build sustainable communities. Communities where people can aspire to live close to their parents, and children to their grandparents. Communities where you don’t spend all day in a car or a bus. Communities, in short, where hard working families can afford to buy their own home.

Labour has set out clear proposals on how to control the cost of building land. We have made it clear that we will drive ahead a real programme of affordable housing. In places like South Dublin, that may mean high density, but it does not have to mean high rise. It does mean better planning at every level. It means understanding how real people live their lives and a vision of how things can be better. Labour has that understanding, and we have that vision.