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

This is part of a series of amendments explained by Deputies Cian O'Callaghan and Ó Broin which seek to exclude what the Bill seeks to include, which is essentially to bring in private investors to develop the public land bank. This is a point I have made to the Minister before, and Deputy O'Callaghan has just made it too. I would love to hear the Minister's response on this. To me, it is not even an ideological comment; it is just a basic statement of fact about a private business. The private developer has no interest, objectively speaking, in solving the housing crisis - none. That is not what it is in business for. That is what the Government is in business for. That is what the local authorities are in business for. That is what not-for-profit housing associations and co-operatives are for. Private investors have one sole purpose and that is to make money. They do not do anything that does not make them a profit. If it is not profitable for them to increase supply, on either public land or private land, they just will not do it. If you needed a lesson in this, you could not get a bigger one than the 2008 crash. At the point at which the cannot make money, private investors are quite capable of crashing an entire economy because they have no interest in building. The idea, therefore, that these people who are interested only in money would not only control the private land bank but also then have significant influence over whether public land gets developed for the public and affordable housing we need is, to my mind, tantamount to madness. I would honestly like to hear the Minister's response. Does he not remember how the public private partnerships, PPPs, that had been set up with certain developers in this country collapsed because the private developers just decided, "This is no longer a good deal for me so I am just not doing it". Plans to develop part of the north inner city just collapsed because the private developers had no interest. This Bill gives the public land bank over as a sort of hostage to private investors and private developers, who, let us be clear, and Deputy Cian O'Callaghan has alluded to this point, have no interest in the price of housing or rents dramatically decreasing. We do. Renters do. Ordinary workers looking to buy have a big interest in having rents or house prices they can afford. Private investors have no interest in that. The last thing they want is for rents or house prices to drop dramatically. It is madness.

Finally, as soon as these PPPs, for want of another term - that is what they are - come into play in one form or another, then accountability and all sorts of secret commercial sensitivity issues come into play such that it is impossible to get to the bottom even of how things are financed and so on. Rather than all that, we are trying to say that while these private interests borrow money, the State can borrow money too. It can tax in order to increase the revenue, but it is more effective and less hostage to market forces for the State to do this itself and, of course, in the long run it will save the State money because we will not be leasing property off these guys further down the line.