Michael Healy-Rae (Kerry, Independent)
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I thank the witnesses for their insightful and helpful thoughts on these matters. I will pick up on one point that Deputy Boyd Barrett has raised not just today but on other occasions. I appreciate all his contributions and I listen closely to him much of the time. I want to declare an interest in this, as I always do and rightly so, because I have been involved since I was 19 years old. It is the rental inflation problem and the serious difficulty there. There is an elephant in the room and I would like to hear people such as Deputy Boyd Barrett speak more about it. A rent of €1,000 is an awful lot of money for the person who has to pay it, but what it means to the person who receives it is €480. I want that to be acknowledged at all times. The biggest taker in the inflationary process in the rental market is the State because the State is collecting 52% in the vast majority of cases.

I know there are foreign companies that come here and it is questionable whether they pay any tax. Perhaps they do not or they pay it at a company rate or they have set up some type of masterful way of avoiding tax, but the ordinary person in the State who is providing accommodation, be it on a small, medium or any type of scale, is paying 52% tax. That has to be acknowledged. It has to be highlighted that this is a fact.

When we talk about the inflation problem that exists I am dealing with it as a politician, but the coalface in Kerry is something that I have never seen in 30 years of experience. I have never seen such a situation with homelessness, with people threatened with having to leave their homes and with people not able to pay the rents. At one time in the town of Killarney, for example, there was no such thing as a property with a rent of over €1,000 per month. My experience goes back to when rents were €400 and €500 per month. Now, it is of no note to hear people who come to a clinic say that they are on rent of €800, €900 or €1,000 and now they are being asked for €1,400 and €1,500. With all due respect, we know what is happening in Dublin with crazy rent, but when it is hitting places such as Killarney town it is making it just impossible, and no new buildings are being built.

I am sorry if it appears that I am picking on Deputy Boyd Barrett. He knows I am not doing that. I hear people saying that we need to have a building programme. The problem is that this seems to be impossible. The private sector is not willing to build because nobody will be willing to buy. There would have to be something wrong with a person at present to decide to borrow the money to buy a new house and rent it out when Deputies are in the Dáil talking about people who own property making a fortune, taking into consideration that out of every €1,000, some €520 will go to the tax man and there is €480 left to pay the insurance, pay the mortgage on the property and try to maintain it and keep it afloat, as it were. Nobody is going to do that in the future.

The State is finding it impossible. The ideal solution of course is if we could do what happened previously, where local authorities could build 100 houses on a greenfield site. That is what happened in places such as Kenmare and Sneem where we might have built 20, 30 or 40 houses and it was a lot pro rata. It was able to cater for the need in the locality. However, that is not happening now. It is leading to an impossible situation. Some 26,000 or 27,000 people, and the gentleman from the ESRI will be able to clarify the number, have left the rental market in the last couple of years. I am not a bit surprised because everyone I know is leaving it, and more are going to leave it. On Radio Kerry recently people who had properties here and there rang the station and told their stories. Jerry O'Sullivan and others listened very carefully to what was being said and to the questions that were asked. It was a case of every regulation in the world being put on these people.

There is one amazing thing I want to highlight. A person who owns a rental property has to make sure the property is up to a proper standard, and rightly so. The local authority enforces that. If the person who owns the property is told that he or she must do a long list of work and if that person tells the local authority that he or she wants to do it but cannot afford it, that is considered an outrageous statement.

The property owner would be told that is not acceptable, he or she would be given so many weeks to do the work and that would be it. If a person comes to me or any other politician at a clinic and says he or she is living in a local authority house, and the heating, roof or windows are very bad, or the front door is not closing properly, and if I then contact the housing department of my local authority, I can seriously be told - it can be sent in an email to me and confirmed in a letter - that-----