The former arts minister and Labour TD for Galway West, Mr Michael D. Higgins, has called on election candidates to state their policy on housing and whether they stand "in favour of the speculators" or in favour of those who need shelter and a home.
He has criticised construction interests he accuses of "running a propaganda campaign" to have the 20 per cent requirement for social housing in all new developments abolished. The housing issue now represents "little less than a social, ethical and moral crisis", he said.
Mr Higgins, who was at an Action for Equality Galway seminar last week, said about 60,000 applicants were still on local authority housing waiting lists, including over 1,500 in Galway.
Many people did not go on the list because they were told the wait would be more than five years. The Taoiseach had admitted the target of 25,000 houses promised in the Programme for Prosperity and Fairness would not be met, and the escalation of house prices was "out of control", he said.
"Acquiring a home is moving beyond the means of over a third of an entire generation," Mr Higgins said. "While the Consumer Price Index has risen by 20 points - from 113 at the end of 1996 to 133 in the third quarter of 2001 - housing prices have risen by seven times the rate of inflation in the same period. While the total output of social housing fell in 1999 to 2000 as compared with the previous decade, the proportions of private housing almost doubled."
In Galway city, some 54 per cent of all house types completed in 2000 were flats or apartments, and "building speculators" had "not left the market", he stressed. "Some economists are even describing this trend as a sign of recovery in the economy. Some media sources report new record prices for houses as if it were a victory. The truth of course is that by regarding housing as a source of fast money for speculators, rather than a social need, the heart is being torn out of our society.
"We are faced with a confrontation between two versions of rights - one based on the market place, the other based on human need. The majority of Irish society, and those who represent them, have been refusing to face up to, or seeking to avoid, this choice."
Mr Higgins criticised the reduction and suspension of capital gains tax by the Government.
"The hoarding of land is a mechanism for forcing up the price and maximising the speculative profit," Mr Higgins said. "We were promised action on this, but in the Finance Act 2001 the speculative tax on hoarding was abandoned on the pretext of bringing the speculators back into the market."
In Galway, the city council's housing strategy showed between a fifth and a quarter of households between 2001 and 2006 would not be able to buy a house. The "best kept secret in Galway" was the number of houses owned by particular individuals and companies, he said.
The recent rise in house prices had increased rents, and the Government had failed to introduce any legislation to protect tenants. Evictions were now a daily occurrence in this "prosperous country" and it was "some achievement for the Government" that more Irish families had lost their homes through eviction in its five-year period in office "than in any corresponding period of the land war in the 19th century under the British".
These evictions had created the new homeless, typically a single parent with one or two children, who were accommodated temporarily in bed-and-breakfast accommodation, Mr Higgins said. This was also the situation for refugees and asylum-seekers.