Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I apologise in advance as I will have to leave to go to the Chamber at 3.10 p.m. for questions to the Minister with responsibility for housing. I will, therefore, ask to be excused.

I wish to make a couple of comments and ask two specific questions. I live in a property in the private rental sector. It is where I want to live and I have a very good landlord. A stable housing system needs a well regulated private rental market of a good size. I am neither against landlords nor the private rental market as long as it is done in the right way. My concern is that we do not have either. We do not have a stable and a properly regulated private rental market, notwithstanding some of the delegates' criticisms of the regulations in place. The specific purpose of the committee is not to look at what will happen in long term from the point of view of the private rental sector; that is something most of us agree that we need to do and we will return to the issue. The purpose of the committee is specifically to look at interventions the Government needs to make now to try to tackle the sharpest end of the housing crisis. My two questions arise in that context.

The delegates have said the vast majority of landlords have a single property or two properties and are what are called accidental or part-time landlords. One of the difficulties with this is, even with the best will in the world, because they see it as a passive investment, they do not have the time or wherewithal to invest in running it as a business or as an active investment. Often even good landlords do not know the law, or what the changes to it are, and this has an impact on the nature of the private rental market. The biggest problem is that this means they are risk averse and think very much of short-term calculations. Given that we know that having such a large number of landlords with a single property makes them risk averse, do the delegates think we can have a stable private rental sector in the short to medium term, or do we need as a longer term objective to start disincentivising these investors from being in that market because they are in the wrong place and should be elsewhere? If so, do the delegates have ideas or proposals for how that could be achieved in a way that would cause least disruption to the people who live in properties in that sector?

The second question is on the need for rent certainty, not rent control. I have a strong view that in the long run rent certainty is good both for the landlord and tenant because it creates stability in the market and that, therefore, one does not have dramatic crashes in rental income when things go bad or dramatic spirals in rent. The Irish Property Owners Association and other landlord representative organisations are steadfastly against this. In the context of our current deliberations, rent certainty would be of huge benefit in stopping people at risk of homelessness because of spiralling rents, many of whom are working and not in receipt of State support from becoming homeless. Is the Irish Property Owners Association open to having a conversation with the Government on the need for rent certainty in exchange for sensible reform of the tax treatment of landlords? When I use the word "reform", I do not mean tax breaks but treating landlords as professional businesses and taxing them in the same way as other professional businesses. If the Irish Property Owners Association continues to set its face against rent certainty, it will not have an open conversations with any of us on what their demands are, whereas if it was to indicate a willingness to contemplate rent certainty, there would be a conversation to be had which could be very good for tenants because it could help to find a way to control rents in a manageable form in line with inflation and at the same time help to professionalise the sector which even the association accepts is needed and would be beneficial for both the landlord and the tenant.