Tom Barry (Cork East, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the delegation for a very interesting conversation. I apologise to Mr. Burgess for missing his contribution. Being from Cork and being a landlord - for my sins - we do not have the same issue as is being experienced in Dublin but that is not to say that it may not happen. The situation now might have come about for different reasons. In the past it may have been caused by profit-taking by people who were buying and selling and there was an element of frenzy in the market. Dublin now has high employment levels and highly-paid employment and people want to live close to their work. Therefore, they are prepared to pay that bit extra and they can afford to do so but this is creating pressure on everyone else and especially those in the social realm. Mr. Burgess has referred to rents of €1,500 a month in Dublin, but rents in Cork which had been €1,000 a month for a typical two-bedroom apartment, dropped to €750 a month and have risen to €900 a month and the value of the properties are still only about 45% of their previous value. We are nowhere near.

We should speak about the categories of those for whom we need to provide housing. For example, the garda and the nurse couple are looking for a house but other different members of society are also looking for housing. A councillor in Cork recently recommended that a person should have at least two or three children in order to get on the housing list. I am not making any judgments but it is something we need to take into account. There are a high number of family break-ups which in many cases result in a requirement for two houses for a family in that a parent living alone will need to provide accommodation for the visiting children. Demand is building from a variety of sectors. It is difficult to provide the correct balance when framing legislation. Sometimes when one speaks about this situation one is accused of being cold-hearted with regard to very difficult human circumstances.

Many landlords, including myself, would prefer not be landlords - we would love to be able to disappear out of that sector. We came in during the high times and we are losing money every week, month and year. We have borne the brunt to date and there is talk now of caps on rent. That is the other side of the argument. Now would be a nice time to be coming into the market. However, that group of investors are still there and those who are paying their way are still being punished for their bad decisions.

The cost of building a home in Cork and Kerry and other parts of the country is still greater than the cost of purchasing a house. While our conversation is important in the context of Dublin we need to distinguish the regions. It could be that the answers for the Dublin situation may also be the answers for Cork and the rest of the country in the future as things lift. We need to discuss the type of housing we need. I do not agree that everybody in Dublin needs a three-bedroom semi. We should have considered building proper high rise buildings. The only reason we built three-storey houses was in order to squeeze more rooms into a lower footprint but a three-storey house is impractical for family living. We then built progressively smaller apartments and because the owners could not sell them they are finding them impractical accommodation for raising a family. It may be necessary to build high-rise buildings in the Dublin area unless we want to have people travelling long distances from outside the city. A significant conversation is needed in this regard.

It was not so long ago that ghost estates were the topic of conversation. People were house-hopping; they would rent a house and then move on to a nicer, newer house. This hopping was at a severe cost to the landlords.

There is a sizeable problem of anti-social behaviour in many estates - although this is not particularly confined to social housing. Landlords have to deal regularly with this behaviour. Certain tenants can make life miserable for everyone else. There are no mechanisms for dealing with people who are not behaving as is appropriate in a community situation. I ask for the views of the delegates on those points.