Mairead Farrell (Galway West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

When we are discussing these things, it is important to look at the real-life daily impact it has on our communities. Just across from the estate I live in a build-to-rent apartment block is going up. We had street meetings organised by residents to discuss the proposals for what is going to be put in place. I must tell the Minister people in my estate were devastated when they heard it was more than likely going be build-to-rent. I come from an estate that was built in the 1950s and that is home to a very strong and proud community. The residents knew that their children and grandchildren would obviously not be able to buy apartments there and that they would more than likely not be able to afford to rent them either. They were left with two choices. We have had the discussion about affordability. We had a good, long discussion yesterday about the whole issue of the affordability crisis. The reality for the people in my area is they do not really have the choice of staying in the community their parents or grandparents live in and helped build because of that affordability crisis.

Deputy Richard Boyd Barrett: We discussed this earlier but it is such and important subject we must put as much pressure as possibly can on the Minister and the Government to rethink their attitude towards these investment vehicles. Sometimes, you repeat phrases so much they begin to lose their value and you forget what we are talking about when we talk about these vulture funds. If anybody wants to remind themselves, go on the websites of the funds. They 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 they can maximise the value. It is not to address the supply but to maximise the value they can get from having an asset in a market where there is a shortage. I would argue these entities have no interest in increasing supply or at least not doing so to the point where rents or prices would actually fall. Why would they ever do that? They want to ensure the value going back to the investors in those funds 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 can possibly be solved by people who have no interest in solving it but actually benefit from rents and house prices being obscenely high. In other words, the value of their 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 they 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

They either have the option of moving extremely far from where they are originally from or, of course, they have to move into the box room in their parents' house, which is, sadly, the reality for many people, as I described to the Minister yesterday when speaking about a constituent who had come in to meet me. We have gone through a huge number of amendments over yesterday and today and, more than likely, we will go through more tomorrow. Sometimes it is important when we discuss these things that we sit back and think about the impact they have on communities because sometimes we can be that little bit removed from that. As I have seen this in my community, I thought it would be important to mention.