Cabinet Committees
Dail Éireann — 2026-09-16
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Richard Boyd Barrett (PBP), Dún Laoghaire

I have asked the Taoiseach repeatedly about the social housing income thresholds. We have had promise after promise that something is going to be done about them. Every single week, pretty much, people are coming to me who find that they have been on a housing list for five, ten or 15 years, all that time waiting, and then because their pay marginally increases, they go over the threshold and all the time is gone. They are left in limbo but their income is not enough to be able to get cost-rental or affordable housing. It is so unfair. At the beginning of 2023, when the Government last raised the limits - it had to be pushed on that as well - the average industrial wage allowed a person to qualify for social housing. Now, with the average industrial wage, a person is over the threshold. It is absolutely unfair. It looks to me like a strategy to get people off the list and maybe even to do away with social housing as we know it and replace it with a higher rent scheme. If it is not, let us see the Government raise the limits. Will it be done before the budget? When will it be done? By how much will it be raised? What will the Government do about the time lost by people who have been thrown off the list over the past three years and have been left in limbo? I would like the Taoiseach to answer those questions.
I would also like to ask the Taoiseach about the three- and four-bedroom issue in social housing developments. One of the major reasons family homelessness and child homelessness are rising, which is absolutely unacceptable, child homelessness in particular, even though there is an uptick in social housing delivery - mostly, it has to be said, through private developers, not through direct construction - is because local authorities are not building three- and four-bedroom houses. In my area, there are no four-bedroom houses planned in future developments over the next number of years and the percentage of three-bedroom houses is abysmal. Something has to be done about delivering three- and four-bedroom local authority houses in order to address child and family homelessness.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-09-16/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-09-28T05:50:48+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-09-16