State must start building to relieve housing crisis

A key issue for our economy for the next decade is that of housing. There are reportedly 7,000 homeless people on our streets and there are tens of thousands of others living in highly expensive glorified squats.

Back in the 1990s, when apartment block after apartment block was being built on Dublin’s quays and elsewhere around the country, many of us felt that government policy towards housing had changed. It was allegedly to address a housing demand but our prior experience with living in multi-story apartment buildings had been abysmal failures. The flats in Ballymun, north Dublin, were a case in point.

From being a nation of wannabe house owners, with 20- and — more recently — 30-year mortgages around our necks, someone had decided that we were now going to move into multi-storey apartments, many without any proper kitchen, with no gardens or even without any recreational areas nearby.