Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I am surprised by what Deputy Doherty said, although I take his figures seriously on effective demand in the figures for people getting mortgage approval. I would have thought there was a huge problem with effective demand, not just in the ability to gather together a deposit but with regard to the multiples. The evidence for this was very apparent to me when I went to the teachers' protest. It would be the same on the nurses' protest. Their income is not enough for them to even dream of buying a house or renting. A person came to me the other day who is a tenured lecturer in a university. The person broke down in front of me because she believes she may be homeless in a couple of months. She has children but is separated. She lives on a tenured university salary in south Dublin but rents are more than half her net salary. It is unsustainable but she will not be able to afford to buy on the Cherrywood development either. She cannot afford the rents and will not be able to buy unless prices, either for renting or buying, are brought significantly down. I do not see how anything the Minister is talking about will achieve that. A hard lid is being kept on salaries and incomes and any increases are not much against a background in which rents and property prices are going through the roof. All the signs are that this measure is actually already putting up prices further. Unless we get prices to affordable levels by controlling prices and controlling rents I do not see how this problem is going to be solved.

Cherrywood could help solve the problem in south Dublin because it is a big site with capacity for 11,000 homes. However, if the vulture fund dictates the prices of most of the properties, and maybe even the 10% to which reference was made, which it will probably lease back to the local authority rather than the authority or an approved housing body taking ownership of it, it will control the speed at which it is all built. It will decide whether a property is for purchase or for rent and will do so on the basis of whatever gives the best price for it. I do not see how it helps. It may make the situation worse but it certainly will not address the problem of the woman who came to see me. I was shocked in that if this could happen to somebody on €70,000 a year, what is the situation for others? In fact, I know what it is because such people walk through the door of my clinic every single week. It is totally impossible for them. Anybody who finds themselves without accommodation in the greater Dún Laoghaire-south Dublin area are in the housing crisis. They are in an emergency situation.

One does not have to be a radical to see things this way. In the 1970s there was the Kenny report, which concluded that we had to control all building land. We had to control prices and supply or we would not meet social need and social demand. Is that not now obviously the case? If the 10% that has been set aside in the Cherrywood development was 50%, would that not bring down the price of rents and so on? Would it not be even better if it was 100%? We would then control the prices. What guarantee can the Minister give that the vulture fund to which he sold the stuff will not just charge whatever it likes and price most people out of the market? I do not think the Minister can give any such guarantee. We have recent experience of this because, before 2008 when there was a large amount of supply, prices were unaffordable and the only way people could afford a house was to take out an unsustainable loan. The only way to resolve the problem of people not having enough income to pay inflated prices is to borrow money, and we know how dangerous that is. People would be borrowing money they could not afford to pay back.