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

I thank the ESRI, and I was listening to the earlier part. I might follow on from some of the questions around housing, because the ESRI and economists are generally very cautious in their use of words. In cautious words, the witnesses are painting a rather grim scenario, would they agree? That is probably accurate, unfortunately, with regard to the housing situation that we are facing. The Taoiseach, Deputy Leo Varadkar, in the context of the eviction debate and the decision to lift the eviction ban, said that most people who may be evicted will not end up homeless. He actually said things like. He said they will probably find somewhere else to live. I found it to be quite a remarkable statement, because is it not an accurate description of the current housing situation to say that almost anything that is coming on the market is completely unaffordable? Has the ESRI looked at that?

To me, even when the famous supply materialises, the gap between what is coming on the market and what people could actually afford with regard to rent or mortgage payments is just enormous. It is unbridgeable for huge numbers of people. I would be interested to hear the witnesses' thoughts on that. Cherrywood, which is very close to me, is the biggest residential development in the country at the moment. They have increase densities and there are going to be up 9,000 or 10,000 units there. Some of the early units are coming on stream now, and the rent for a two-bedroom apartment is €2,600. The witnesses could probably do the maths quicker than I could, but that is in the region of €30,000 a year that you would have to pay in rent. That is just completely unaffordable for vast swathes of our working population, never mind people who are dependent on pensions or welfare payments.

I would like to hear a little bit more from the witnesses. Do they accept that there is a yawning gap between what is out there, and what people could afford to pay, even when the famous supply arrives? I cannot see any prospect of the supply reaching a point where prices might start to reduce, and that rents or house prices might start to come down. In that context, would it be fair to say that we have got to think very urgently about some radical measures to do something about that? Even business people are now saying that this is a major problem for their ability to recruit and retain workers in whole numbers of areas. Maybe the witnesses would have something to say about that, and the potential impacts on the ability of other sectors of the economy to start to function, or to sustain themselves.

In that context, I know that people say controls on rents or State measures to control the price of land, which were mentioned, maybe do not solve all of the problem. However, do we not need to consider them at this stage? We are at that point where there is nothing in the medium term that is going to change that situation. That is what the witnesses seem to be saying. Around Helsinki in Finland, which one of the few countries where homelessness has reduced, they have nationalised all of the building land. The state has just taken it all over, and they are controlling, quite centrally, the planning and building of housing, and what type of housing it is. In fact, the preponderant thing has to be the delivery of stuff that is affordable or social, because the market is failing, and that is why they took that move.

I wonder if the witnesses have any thoughts on that, and about a more serious form of rent control. The thing I would favour is having maximum rent levels, which ensure that rents simply cannot be higher than what ordinary workers are able to afford.

I am not saying that is the entire solution because we obviously need the supply to ramp up as well. However, should these be things we start to consider, given there is fairly catastrophic market failure at present?