Statement by the Communist Party of Ireland
24 July 2018
The Communist Party of Ireland notes with interest the comments made by the minister for housing, Eoghan Murphy, when addressing the media.
He admitted that the rent of a two-bedroom apartment in the proposed “cost-rental” development at St Michael’s Estate, Inchicore, Dublin, would be €1,400 per month—which is close to the CPI’s costing of €1,500 per month, which it has raised many times in warning that in no way is a rent of €1,400 per month “affordable” for workers.
The chairperson of the Dublin Branch, Jimmy Doran, said: “This cost-rental system will see the lower-paid subsidising the lower-paid, with the working class yet again shouldering the burden of our broken economic system.
“Public housing must be universally accessible to stop it becoming ghettoised or a last resort for the poor.
“As the Communist Party has warned many times, the fixation on ‘cost-rental’ is a vehicle for ameliorating some of the excesses of the current housing crisis but without grasping the nettle and coming into conflict with landlords or the EU.
“The involvement of the European Investment Bank in the St Michael’s project is more evidence that the Communist Party’s analysis of this crisis is the only one that holds up to scrutiny. The Government’s strategy is to solve the crisis in housing to the benefit of capital, and not workers.”
