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

We discussed this earlier but it is such and important subject that we must put as much pressure as possibly can on the Minister and the Government to rethink their attitude towards these investment vehicles. Sometimes we repeat phrases so much that they begin to lose their value and we forget what we are talking about when we talk about these vulture funds. If anybody wants to remind themselves, they should go on the websites of the funds. Those are the best places to find out what they are about. They tell you, in very stark, frankly ruthless, terms, what they are about and none of what they are about is the provision of housing to people who need it. There is none of that. I am looking at Lone Star at the moment. I was looking at Kennedy Wilson before that. I have looked at Hines and at Apollo Asset Management. You can go through the whole list of these funds and you will not find a single word on their websites about trying to help people into homes. Not a word. Lone Star, for example, says it specifically seeks to capitalize on market conditions "... in markets that have suffered an economic and/or banking crisis, resulting in a dislocation in asset pricing and value opportunities". That is the literal definition of a vulture. We move in on a situation in distress where assets are undervalued and we gobble them up. Then we unlock value. That is another expression. We do value creation. None of that is about trying to build new houses for people who need them. It is absolutely about literally circling the world looking for undervalued assets in economies in distress and trying to maximise the value. Alternatively, the funds look to where there are specific shortages which mean that they can maximise the value. It is not about addressing the supply; it is about maximising the value they can get from having an asset in a market where there is a shortage.

I would argue that these entities have no interest in increasing supply, or at least not in doing so to the point where rents or prices would actually fall. Why would they ever do that? They want to ensure that the value going back to their investors stays up and that they get the maximum possible return. Thus, it is not in their interests that the problem the Minister says the Government wants to solve, namely, the housing crisis, be solved. It cannot possibly be solved by people who have no interest in solving it but who actually benefit from rents and house prices being obscenely high. In other words, the value of their assets is obscenely high because that is how the funds look at them. That is the language that litters their websites. It is the language with which those involved try to entice people to invest in their vulture funds. They say come to us because we can make you a lot of money by circling and looking for opportunities to do so. That is their agenda, their objective and what they succeed in doing. The consequences of that are unpayable rents, unaffordable house prices and the domination of the housing sector by people who have no interest in resolving the problem we as a society believe it is important to solve.

I do not know whether this is just ideological or whether it is just a mistake the Government has made, but it has got it wrong on this one. Anything we can do, here or anywhere else, to try to make the Government and the Minister reconsider is worth doing because this is a dire mistake. If you want to solve a problem about the basic human need to have an affordable, secure roof over your head, you do not go to entities which, quite literally and unashamedly, are operating as vultures and the objective and raison d'êtreof which is to be profit-hungry vultures.