Taoiseach Micheál Martin has said he is not going to get into a debate with President Michael D Higgins over the housing crisis.
Despite several questions put to him about President Higgins’ comments in which he described housing in Ireland a “disaster,” Mr Martin said: “It is not appropriate for me to engage in any debate with the President nor do I intend to do so.”
When asked if he accepted President Higgins’ description of the housing situation as a disaster, the Fianna Fáil leader added: “As I said, I’m not going into a debate with the President.
“If you want to ask me [questions] about housing, I’ll take those and as I have said when I became Taoiseach, the number one issue I said we have to face is housing.
“If you’re asking me a question more generally about housing, I said when I was elected as Taoisigh that the greatest, single social crisis facing our country was housing and that is the priority of the Government and remains the priority of the Government and the Housing for All strategy represents the most comprehensible strategy in recent years that has been put forward to deal with a very serious crisis that’s facing so many people.”
On Tuesday, President Higgins described housing in Ireland as "our great, great failure" and said "it isn't a crisis anymore, it is a disaster."
Reacting to President Higgins' comments, Fine Gael leader Leo Varadkar said: “The President is somebody who's always been and often outspoken in his views because he’s the President, he’s above politics, above party politics and is immune in many ways of criticism and scrutiny so I’m not going to be critical of him in any way.
“I think some of what he said was true quite frankly.
“The housing crisis is a disaster for a lot of people.
“For the 60% or 70% of us who own our own homes whether it’s outright or through a mortgage, that’s not the case.
“But for people who are paying very high rents, often half their income in rents, that’s a disaster and it is a fact that in Ireland at the moment, very often you know, a couple both of who have decent jobs are unable to afford a home and that wasn’t the case for most of our history and to me that’s a social disaster you know people who are working hard to have decent incomes, can’t afford to buy a home and many are so frustrated at that they’re even willing to turn to populism and nationalism and euroscepticism as a solution and in that scenario they may lose their job as well as their house but that is a disaster in my view.”
When asked if the social disaster was caused by Fine Gael being in power for years, Mr Varadkar said “it is a failing of successive Governments.”
He told Newstalk: “We’re responsible for solving it.
“I don’t think we’re responsible for the construction bubble and the housing crash and all of the things that happened. Part of the reason why we have the housing crisis that we have is because 12 years ago we had a housing bubble, a banking and construction collapse and I certainly wasn’t responsible for that.
“We are responsible for fixing the problem.
“Criticism and describing a problem is one thing, but coming up with solutions and operationalising them is another.
“I think it's a failing of successive Governments.
“Including with the Labour Party, with left wing Independents, now with Fianna Fáil, if you look at the situation North of the border where Sinn Fein has been in power for the best part of 20 years, homelessness, rents are going up, a lot of the same problems.
“I think it’s a criticism of all of us and I accept that criticism.”
