Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I endorse everything that has been said so far. This Bill has a simple purpose. In fact, it is so simple and so obvious that in most countries, it would not be needed. Its aim is to link rents in the private rental sector to incomes, to link what people pay in rent to what they earn. However, we are so slavish in our devotion to the free market under this and previous Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael governments, and their helpers in the Labour Party in the past and in the Green Party, that such a common-sense approach is greeted with outrage and anger. How dare we interfere with the market and with private property rates, is what we constantly hear. When the landed gentry here, masquerading as representatives of ordinary people, cry foul over interference with private property, what they mean is that we should not interfere with their right to profit from the misery of the housing crisis.

What we see in Ireland is not a failure of the rental or housing market. What we are seeing is exactly how a market works when the State abdicates its responsibility. The market will extract whatever it can from people, even for the provision of the most basic human need, a roof over one's head. In the 1980s, a Fianna Fáil landlord took a court case and apparently it has been written in stone since then that we cannot interfere with rents or the market. People seem to forget that the Constitution also talks about the public good and that property rights are not unlimited. We need to realise the public good means having a housing market that delivers housing for all and a rental market that sees rents have a connection to people's actual income and earnings.

Even the limited rent pressure zones, which were introduced with trepidation by Fine Gael as if they were offending some sacred god of the market, have not worked. We know that one third of all renters pay over 50% of their income in rent and we know from a previous report that one in ten renters spend about 60% of their wages on rent. In an OECD report from some years ago, we had the dubious honour of being top of the global league table for having the largest percentage of household income spent on rent. These statistics and reports, the figures for ever-growing average rents, the disconnect between the wages and incomes of renters and the profits and gains of landlords, both small and corporate, are all a reflection not of a market failure but of a market success. When we do not interfere with or regulate the supply of a basic human good, this is what we get. We get rents that have no connection to people's ability to pay. We get rents that have no connection to wages or incomes and we get record profits for real estate investment trusts and other corporate landlords.

Last year we were told a renter would have to be earning €95,000 per year to afford the average rent in a new development in Dublin, where rents were hitting in excess of €2,000 for a one-bedroom unit, and stay within the internationally recognised guideline of what constitutes affordable rent, which is spending 30% or less of one's income on rent. Not to state the obvious, but the vast majority of citizens in this State do not earn €95,000. This Bill is not a radical or revolutionary measure. It is not the start of a mad campaign to take private property rights away from anyone. It is a sensible and logical attempt to regulate the market, to ease the frustration of renters and to stop the sacrificing of renters at the altar of the free market and the gods of profit.

I want to answer a question posed recently by a Deputy in this House. He asked if there was something wrong with making a profit from your house and my answer is "Yes". There is something wrong, in the middle of a housing emergency, with making a profit from renting out multiple properties because that crisis or emergency is affording a huge benefit to some while inflicting misery and terror on others. It is immoral to profit on the back of an historic housing crisis. The situation is not normal and it should not mean that landlords get to decide what rents they can extract from desperate people in need of a home. What if we were speaking about food? If some had access to food supplies in a time of great hunger, would we say "let the market decide the price of food for everybody"? Would we think it is okay for some to starve while others enriched themselves from a crisis or would we think it was right to interfere in the market to ensure nobody starved?

It is wrong because landlords inherit wealth and privilege to get control over the supply and cost of a basic human need. We must put a stop to the myths that surround landlords with multiple properties or corporate entities. They did not work for it. They did not get it by hard work or enterprise. Most of it is inherited, both the wealth and the ability to accumulate properties. They did not find a cure for cancer or reinvent the wheel. They were lucky or they were privileged or both. We must stop the nonsense that says they should be granted unlimited access to continue profiting from the control of housing or the ability to buy up properties.

The outrage that greets any proposal to regulate or control the rental market is very telling. It stems from the very obvious fact that for many of Ireland's wealthy landlords, their wealth is inherited and passed on. It did not come from any great industrial development but from the control of property and land.

By God, they are determined to retain control over that property. That is why when we propose a referendum to enshrine the right to housing in the Constitution, it too is greeted with outrage that we should want to interfere with property rights. We do. We want to interfere with the rights of corporate landlords and of developers who hoard land banks and derelict sites and with the rights of multiple property owners to charge whatever rents they can extract from ordinary people.

We have a simple proposal today to tie rents to people’s incomes and ability to pay, and, in the longer term, we propose to give people the right to housing, which would force this Government to stop looking to the market for the solution, but rather to control what happens in housing and to link rent, as has happened when differential rents are applied to social housing. People pay a proportion of their income and not an astronomical amount of rent over and above what they can afford.

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