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

Respond is in a dilemma because the best it could come up with is a price of €1,200 a month for cost-rental when what is affordable for average incomes is between €700 and €900. That is the pressure they are put under. Said pressure is going to be exacerbated. The more housing bodies have to do to get this off their balance sheets, the more they potentially come under pressure from private financial lenders on which they must rely in order to improve their balance sheets.

While I do not doubt the bona fides of the AHBs, there are questions regarding their becoming corporatised in other jurisdictions. I was in a bar in Dún Laoghaire when I was approached by a man who told me that he is involved with a hedge fund in New York that is considering moving into social housing in Ireland. The alarm bells started ringing as to what its agenda is in wanting to move into social housing. By moving into this space, housing bodies are opening up the danger of affordable and social housing becoming corporatised where profit motives come into play. I know that the bodies represented here today do not have them, but I fear that is the door they are opening.

I am a member of the Committee on Budgetary Oversight. A serious debate is starting on how capital expenditure generally is treated under the fiscal rules. It is not working. It is not necessary to be a left-winger; very mainstream people are saying there is something wrong with how they are designed and particularly with how they treat capital expenditure. Nowhere is this truer than in the area of public and affordable housing. We need to say that. I am sure many people in Europe will back us up in stating that these rules need to change because they are pushing us towards the privatisation or worse the potential extinction of public housing as we know it.