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

I think the Minister understands the logic of my question. At a rough calculation, based on questions I asked in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown, the average rent is estimated at approximately €600 a month, approximately €7,000 a year per tenant, and this is in differential rent schemes. Every year, we are spending approximately €500 million or more of public money in the form of rent allowance and it is going into the pockets of private landlords and developers, many of them are the very same developers who helped bankrupt this country. If those tenants, who are all housing applicants, were to be housed by local authorities, we would save approximately €0.5 billion a year directly and we would accrue, I estimate, about another €0.5 billion in revenue to the State. This is a no-brainer. Why do we not do it? We could move immediately in this direction by directly taking into local authority control empty housing and developments in the hands of the NAMA developers. In addition, I do not understand the logic of ending the direct construction of social housing when it pays the State a return to have its own local authority housing and the revenue would return directly to the State. Rent allowances or leasing arrangements would not then be required which subsidise private landlords and developers. We could make €1 billion in savings a year if we did this so why is it not done?

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