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

I thank the Minister for his contribution. The cost-of-living crisis, which is manifested in multiple areas, is the biggest challenge that we have in supply. It is self-evidently a challenge for large parts of our population, but it will also pose a very serious challenge economically and financially to the State because if people cannot afford to live here, they will not come here in as large numbers as the Minister said we want them to come here to fill some gaps. In addition, many qualified young people are leaving because they cannot afford to live here. We need to address that urgently.

The Minister said we cannot fully insulate people from the impact of the rising cost of living, the Ukraine crisis and so on. That is a phrase the Government is using but we could be doing a hell of a lot more than we are. At the moment our approach to the rising cost of rent and housing is to fill the gap with housing assistance payment, which is just money into the pockets of developers and landlords. We are chasing the runaway market with public money and it is still not solving the problem. It is pouring an enormous amount of money down the drain. Similarly, in another area of rising prices in energy, we are forced to give people additional money because of runaway prices there.

Should we not, for which the Minister is aware we have advocated, be trying to actually control the price of these things so that we do not need to throw good money after bad chasing runaway prices? Why does the Government hold out against having a more serious regime of rent controls, for example? The Minister may be aware I have highlighted recently that France faced with the same situation has introduced a regime of rent controls where rents are set at affordable levels. The French do not allow the cost of rent to go up further and therefore beyond the reach of many people. Should we not do that given the enormous impact that unaffordable rents are having at every level on the people who cannot afford those rents and the number of people it is driving into homelessness with the State trying to chase those rents with nearly €1 billion in HAP, a figure that is likely to rise? Why do we not try to control rents?

I say the same about other types of price increases in energy. We should try to actually control the prices, not just forgo a small amount of tax revenue or throw a few bob at people to try to manage the bills, although that is better than nothing. Should we not try to get to the root of it and try to address the fact that these costs are going up because mostly private companies but also some State-owned companies are putting up prices to levels that are simply unaffordable and unsustainable?

Would the Minister accept that to a certain degree the cost-of-living crisis is not a crisis for everybody but only a crisis for the majority of working people on low and middle incomes? Over the difficult period the Minister has characterised with the Ukraine crisis, the Covid crisis before that and possibly back to the financial crash before that with the consequences of austerity and so on, there were always some winners and there are winners even now. The Minister pointed out that we have significant economic growth and corporate profits have increased consistently.

There are people who are doing okay out of this - presumably, the people who are the beneficiaries of the price rises. Self-evidently, the landlords do okay out of very high rents. Some of the big corporations that are charging the high prices are doing fine. They are doing very well out of this and the more prices go up, the more profit they seem to make. The energy companies are making lots of profits but the people paying the price are those who have to rent or who have to pay for their heating and energy. The Government is not doing anything to address that side of it and control those prices, possibly by imposing some sort of windfall tax on the beneficiaries of the current situation. I would like the Minister to address those points.