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

Deputy Mulherin is absolutely right when she says NAMA has failed spectacularly to deal with the enormous housing crisis we now face. While she does not say so explicitly, it is an implicit and severe indictment of the Government because it has allowed NAMA to behave in the way it has. Many of us on this side of the House have been saying since we arrived here and the Government took office that NAMA should have been transferring much more land and property directly to local authorities to provide social housing. The Government simply did not listen. We have got a derisory social dividend from NAMA and that failure is one of the major contributory factors to the catastrophic social housing crisis we face.

The problem is that the horse has, to a very large extent, bolted and a levy does not really deal with it. What should happen is a simple change of NAMA's entire mandate or to have all available housing and land that could be used for social housing immediately transferred to local authorities. Any cash that NAMA generates should provide the capital for a major social housing construction programme instead of being used to pay off bonds. While a lot of the money has been used to redeem its bonds, at one stage when NAMA appeared before a committee, it had €4 billion in cash reserves. That money could have financed a serious social housing programme. Recently, its cash reserves have been reduced considerably because NAMA has used the money to redeem bonds. We could have put billions of euro into a social housing programme but did not. I do not know the latest position but maybe the Minister of State can enlighten the House. Do we have an estimate of how much more cash NAMA will generate from the off-loading of land and properties before it is due to dissolve itself? What are we doing with that money? Why do we not say now that the money will be used as the capital for a serious emergency programme of direct social housing provision?

A levy will just not cut it at this stage. It will not make any difference. The big question is the mandate the Government gives NAMA. That mandate should change so that NAMA is not there simply to unload big lots of land or property to whoever it can sell to just for money. The whole mandate should be geared around the provision of social housing and resolving the housing crisis. If its mandate is not changed in those terms, NAMA should be dissolved and everything it has simply given to local authorities. As we will discuss in more detail later, even if we did that, the Government would still have to provide the money for a serious social housing programme. Despite all of the spin and propaganda of the Government about the billions of euro to be applied before 2017 and 2020, one finds when one looks at the detail of the Government's social housing strategy 2020 that there will be no big social housing building programme. Approximately 85% to 90% of what the Government is doing is outsourcing to the private sector. Given the scale of the crisis, that means the stealth privatisation of social housing will be the long-term effect of the Government's policy, including in the legislation before the House. It is to Deputy Mulherin's credit that she points to the issue of NAMA and what it has not been doing and should be doing, but this particular amendment will simply not deal with the problem. The problem is one of Government policy.

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