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

Every opportunity must be taken to highlight the scandalous suite of measures being introduced by this Government to provide a form of corporate welfare to private developers to enable them to profit from the current housing crisis of which Home Building Finance Ireland, HBFI, is another component.

Every opportunity must be taken to highlight the scandalous suite of measures being introduced by this Government to provide a form of corporate welfare to private developers to enable them to profit from the current housing crisis, of which Home Building Finance Ireland, HBFI, is another component. The suite of measures, when taken together, is shocking in the extreme. It includes NAMA's policy for disposal, the local infrastructure housing activation fund, LIHAF, HBFI and the Land Development Agency. When one thinks about how they add up, it is beyond scandalous. The Mafia could not have dreamt up a scheme like this. What we are doing is selling land to private developers at massive discounts via NAMA or giving developers cheap land via the Land Development Agency. We are then using public money to provide the services infrastructure - roads, sewers and so on - via the LIHAF. Then we are going to lend money to developers, to whom the banks will not lend, to build on that land. The public is doing everything for these people and at the end of this process they will sell the properties they build at unaffordable market prices. We are handing to these people the means of making enormous sums of money, courtesy of the public and, at the end of it, we will have housing that no one can afford. The people who need that housing will not be able to afford it.

I am a member of the Oireachtas Committee on Budgetary Oversight which engaged with representatives of the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council, IFAC, yesterday. They pointed out that while there is no immediate threat of overheating in the economy, the one area where overheating is possible is in the housing sector because rents and property prices are too high. This is creating pressure and could cause economic overheating by fuelling wage demands and labour shortages, thus reducing the capacity of the economy. This Government scheme is going to fuel this further. It is not going to supply housing to the people who need it and will create an overheating pressure within the economy, and yet the Government is going ahead with it. It is beyond belief. The only beneficiary from this will be the developer. I do not understand how the Government can possibly justify this. I am keen to hear the Minister of State's response, but without an absolute condition that no finance is extended to anyone to do anything other than build social and affordable housing, then HBFI is a scandal. If it had the conditionality that finance would be extended to build only social and affordable housing, there would be some justification for it, but other than that, it is outrageous.