Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has said “big budget announcements” will not fix the housing crisis, insisting that this year’s budget will not only focus on housing.
The Irish Times reported this morning that Varadkar rejected calls for a “housing budget”, saying “a budget has to be comprehensive, it can’t just be about any one problem”.
Speaking to reporters in Galway, where the annual Fine Gael think-in is taking place before the new Dáil term, Varadkar said: “The budget has to be about pensions and welfare, it has to be about health, it has to be about housing, it has to be about education, it has to be about infrastructure, it has to be about climate change, it has to be about the tax burden that a lot of middle income families bear, it has to be about childcare.”
Varadkar said the budget would be “letting people down” if it focused only on just one aspect. “There are lots of issues in our society that need to be dealt with”, he said.
The government has come under fire in recent times for the accommodation crisis in Dublin. In July, members of Take Back Trinity occupied two vacant properties, as part of a broad coalition of housing activists. Today, the Union of Students’ in Ireland (USI), along with Trinity College Dublin Students’ Union (TCDSU), the Graduate Students’ Union (GSU) and Take Back Trinity, pledged its support to the march, instead of organising its annual pre-budget march for education.
Varadkar said the government had already “allocated a big increase in spending on new housing, on social housing and also on developing land for private housing”.
“The number of people rough sleeping is down by about 40 per cent – that’s evident to people who walk around Dublin, that there are fewer rough sleepers than there were this time last year. And that’s because of Housing First and our partnership with the Peter McVerry Trust”, he said.
“The number of new homes built – 4,400 new homes built in the last three months, more than in the entire year of 2010. I don’t think anyone can deny that progress. Look at the official statistics when it comes to rent – the ESRI-RTP statistics – we see rent increases of about 2 per cent over the last six months, as opposed to the double digit increases that we would have had in the past. So there are areas where we do have progress, compared to last year”, Varadkar said.
Varadkar said that he can “understand why people are sceptical but if there was a quick-fix solution to this problem I think other people or other parties would have put that forward by now – would have published it, would have defended it, would have brought it through the Dáil, for example. We don’t have a majority in the Dáil, the opposition does. The truth is there is no quick fix. I think the vast majority of people do understand that”.
