Labour Youth launches new campaign on decent housing for all
Labour Youth is launching a new campaign on the need for decent housing for all. Speaking about the campaign Chair of Labour Youth Patrick Ahern said:
“For years now we’ve been in the grips of a worsening housing crisis and Fine Gael’s policy of treating housing simply as a commodity is only making things worse.
“There’s so much about Ireland’s housing policies that could be better and there are so many actions Fine Gael could take to improve the situation that they’re refusing to.
“This campaign aims to go some way towards helping to highlight the policy failures, the human cost of this crisis, and to aid in the movement for a more humane, people-centred approach to housing in the Republic of Ireland and away from the profit-driven system we have at the moment.
“Fine Gael’s ‘Rebuilding Ireland’ plan has been running for over three years now and in that time the number of people homeless, rents, and the cost of buying a house have all gone up. ‘Rebuilding Ireland’ has failed everyone and turned out to be little more than an empty slogan.
“We need to start treating housing for what it really is – a social need that everyone should have.
“We don’t have enough housing for everyone who needs it, so we need the government to start building public housing on a large-scale again.
“We need an immediate freeze on rents as well as better protections for renters and the introduction of the long-awaited Deposit Protection Scheme.
“Most of all we need a referendum on enshrining a right to housing in the Constitution. This is something that is included in the constitutions of 81 countries across the world and is supported by almost all the opposition parties here but that Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil continue to oppose.
This needs to change.”