Thomas Pringle TD
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Pringle: Government’s ‘Housing for All’ is failing

Pringle: Government’s ‘Housing for All’ is failing

Independent TD for Donegal, Thomas Pringle, said the Government’s Housing for All policy continues to fail to meet its targets.

Addressing the Dáil on Tuesday evening, Deputy Pringle said: “The Minister and those on the government benches can trumpet all the aspirational target figures they want. But the stark reality is that these targets are not being met and will not be met.

“This plan is failing and will continue to fail,” he said. The deputy was speaking during statements on the Housing for All update.

The deputy said: “It is failing primarily because it is built on a foundation of sand that is the government’s hard right-wing ideological belief that the market will provide. A blatant fallacy that time and time again has produced the same failed result, yet Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Greens remain wedded to it. It must be some form of political Stockholm Syndrome.”

Deputy Pringle said: “At a recent meeting with Donegal County Council we were told that while they have a target of 878 housing units by 2026, their realistic output will leave them around 30 per cent short of this figure. They are hamstrung by the inability to fund appropriate land purchases.

“The last Housing for All quarterly report noted that in Donegal, since its inception, approved housing bodies have had no funding whatsoever approved. I raised the issue of the financial matrix that is constraining approved housing bodies in rural counties such as Donegal with the Taoiseach in March of this year.

“Nothing has been done,” he said.

Deputy Pringle said: “Since the budget last week, I’ve been inundated with calls from across the constituency from those near the income thresholds for social housing, asking were they going to be kicked off the list.

“Did you even consider this at all during your budget preparations? Or were you hoping that it would be missed and that you’d get to skim another raft of people off the list and claim it as a policy victory. Because if you shorten the list surely you have a success in providing housing.

“You increased the thresholds of only 5 of 31 local authorities last month. And there wasn’t rhyme nor reason as to how this decision was arrived at. You don’t know the true scale of this crisis because you don’t want to know, I believe.

“And all the fancy infographics in the world won’t change that,” he said.