The Workers’ Party have said that only the construction of large amounts of public housing, directly built using a state housing corporation, will resolve the current housing crisis.

Workers’ Party Dublin North West representative Gavin Mendel-Gleason criticised Minister Eoghan Murphy for using vacant housing as a distraction from the real issue:

Earlier this week Minister Eoghan Murphy told us about plans to identify vacant houses and asked local authorities to assist this work. He launched a new website where people can put in the details of vacant homes in their area.

This is simply a distraction. The truth is that last year’s Census identified all of the vacant houses in the country. Each local authority knows where the vacant houses are. The CSO, using public money, has done this work already. The level of detail for each area is available to the Minister.

Mendel-Gleason continued:

The market has clearly failed us but once again, this government is happy to waste time and money instead of doing what we all now know is needed: building public housing. This is the real task facing the government, not public relations stunts which have no impact on the desperate situation facing hundreds of thousands of ordinary people struggling to keep a roof over their heads.

Mendel-Gleason concluded:

The Workers’ Party’s plan for public housing, Solidarity Housing, that has now been adopted by trade union think tanks and others, outlines exactly how to solve the housing crisis. We need a state housing corporation, funded through off-books borrowing, to build public housing on a scale not seen since the 1940s.

Read Solidarity Housing here: http://workersparty.ie/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Solidarity-Housing-7.pdf