Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

First, the Minister is now initiating a review we have been calling for for years. Second, the role these institutions are playing in new apartments being built is that they are purchasing the apartments. They are not just funding them. Both forward funding and forward purchasing exist, and what is happening in Ireland is the latter. These institutions are going into a contract and saying that when a given block of apartments has been built, they will buy them from the developer. They are not providing the capital and the developer still has to go to the banks and so on. They are buying the apartments, but they are playing another large role the Minister wants to avoid mentioning, namely, they are pushing up rents. Approved housing bodies have told us the institutions have firepower that others do not have and that they are pushing up the prices of houses.

Of course, international investment has a role to play in dealing with our housing crisis, but the tax treatment of IREFs and REITs does not. If that were the case and if, as the Minister argues, the reason we have seen price rises from approximately €3,000 to €8,000 is related to the fact we have allowed IREFs and REITs not to pay any income tax on rents or any CGT when they dispose of their assets, why would we not give that to everybody? Why not give every landlord the same benefit and ensure they will create property?

The Minister has created a scenario whereby it is very expensive to the State, but that is not even my core issue here. He has allowed these institutional investors to distort the housing market to a degree that is absolutely crazy. The President called it a "disaster" and the Minister's party leader has called it an "emergency". It is an absolute catastrophe, and the Minister's taxation policies are interlinked with exactly what has happened here. I do not want to take him to task over specific details but he can look at commencement figures over the years, and while the number of commencements has increased this year, they are going in the wrong direction, as I think he will acknowledge. The Minister has been at the helm for so long, and we have a housing crisis that has happened not because of a war in Ukraine or a pandemic that spread across the globe but because of policies Governments introduced. This is manmade. The Minister is one of the architects of the housing crisis; he cannot shy away from that. He has been there throughout this period.

I reiterate my question. How bad does it have to get before the Minister recognises that he is responsible, through his policies, for creating a situation we should never have had in the first place? I put it to him that this taxation part of it is another example of how he is making things worse. I acknowledge he will not agree with me on this, and perhaps in his little bubble he thinks he has been doing a great job in tackling the housing crisis, but did the Government not create the housing crisis? Does he think it was something that just accidentally happened? It was Government policies that failed to react and to put in place a response. The Minister's party leader says houses cannot be built overnight, but he has been in the Cabinet for 12 years. I cannot recall how long the Minister has been at Cabinet, but their party has been in leadership for more than a decade. That is where this has all come from.

This is crazy stuff that is happening and it is getting worse.

As I said to the Minister last Thursday, this is not just price pressures on individuals; it is spilling over. There are schools in this city that can get teachers but the teachers cannot get accommodation. Nurses cannot get accommodation. People I know who were working in this city are now in London and Sydney. One of them said to me that it is the difference between sharing a house with two people or sharing a house with six people because that is how many people need to be crammed in to afford to live in Dublin. It is madness. We have had this discussion over and over again.