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

We have had a long debate on this matter. We have gone through the various arguments in great detail on Committee and Report Stages. The five amendments I have tabled and the amendments tabled by some other Deputies deal with the worst aspects of this Bill. We have argued at length about the big weaknesses in the Bill. There are one or two strengths as well. The get-out clauses and loopholes in this Bill will allow private developers to avoid providing the amount of social and affordable housing that is necessary to address the absolutely dire crisis in this area. All of the Government's efforts in this regard will come to nothing because of what it is proposing to do in this section of the Bill. Developers will no longer have to assign 20% of any development to social and affordable housing. Instead, they will be able to get out of having to meet the 10% level that the Government is now setting by opting to lease the property back to the council. They will keep the property. The tenants, the State and the wider public Exchequer will fork out money to them week after week and month after month. The gold mine we are opening up for developers will cost the State an absolute fortune at a time when rents are increasing.

A tiny number of property developers and big property speculators control a vast amount of the property in this country. Indeed, the ownership of commercial residential property is now more concentrated in them than it was before the disastrous boom. We are going to be complete hostages to them, to such a degree that it could bankrupt the State. Rather than dealing with the social housing crisis, this measure will suck money out of the public coffers. That money could be used to deal with the social and affordable housing crisis in the permanent, serious and sustainable way in which it should be dealt with. The direct construction by the State of its own council houses would save us the money that would not have to go to private landlords and would generate rental revenue back for the State. It is beyond me that the Minister of State and his colleagues do not see the economic logic of such an approach, which also represents the best solution to deal with the housing crisis. I suggest the only explanation is that they are the hostages of these big developers, speculators and financial institutions and that the troika is backing all of this up. That is the purpose of this measure. The decision to give the developers a big get-out clause that will make a bad situation worse completely unwinds any possible progressive element in this Bill.

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