Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I echo what has been said by Deputy Coppinger. What has happened in Tyrrelstown and Cork is a predictable outcome of the activities of NAMA and, I would argue, the Minister for Finance, Deputy Michael Noonan. The Government set out deliberately to attract corporate investment funds with tax incentives. The Sunday before the general election, The Sunday Business Postreported this was coming down the tracks and stated we would see an escalation and increase in pressure from these investment companies to retrieve money from the loans they bought. A huge number of loan portfolios were taken over by vulture corporate investment funds and a huge number of apartments have been gifted through real estate investment trusts, REITS. What we are witnessing is the corporatisation of landlordism in this country, and NAMA has done this in acting to offload as quickly as possible all it has on its loan book. We have evidence through freedom of information that Government officials met vulture funds no fewer than 65 times in 2013 and 2014.

These meetings included direct meetings with the Taoiseach. Freedom of information requests reveal that these included companies like Apollo, Lone Star and Kennedy Wilson. What we are seeing in Tyrrelstown and in Cork will be repeated around the country as these vulture funds, which do not give a damn about ordinary people, like those sitting in the Visitors Gallery today, will try to retrieve the moneys they invested in a very quick and parasitic way.

NAMA itself is extremely corrupt. Many of its officials have joined these private funds or set up their own REITs to cash in on the frenzy to get rid of the property at the lowest price as quickly as possible and to use this to build up contracts to their own advantage. NAMA should and could have a social role but it has been completely minimised by its reliance on the private market to deliver houses, which is at the heart of the problem of homelessness and the housing crisis that we see in the State today. Effectively, the State has ended up funding private landlords, who buy up properties and then rent them back to the State, which then gives them over to people on the housing list at a very slow pace through HAPS and RAS. We are massaging the palms of the very wealthy corporate landlords in this country and paying for it through the taxpayer. NAMA is actually worsening the crisis.

What we need to argue for, as well as an emergency being declared in public housing, is that NAMA must be democratised and transformed into an agency that will drive social and affordable home-building and use its vast loans and billions in resources to conduct an audit of vacant properties as part of the 2016 census, to seek to acquire the tens of thousands of vacant properties and apartments for use as social and affordable houses to relieve the crisis in the short and medium term and in the long term to implement a plan of massive public investment, involving the councils, to build thousands of social and affordable homes, including Traveller-specific accommodation and accommodation for refugees and asylum-seekers. This also has to be linked to the notion of rent controls where the consumer price index should be backdated to 2011 levels and rents should be brought down to realistic, affordable levels for people in this country. That should be done immediately and rent controls should be realistically enforced, particularly in the cities of Dublin, Cork, Limerick and Galway. All this means that we have to redirect our funding, taking into account the €4.5 billion that NAMA has, to building public housing, to have a €2 billion investment from the Ireland Strategic Investment Fund, to be repaid over time in income from social and affordable rents. As we will always say on this side of the House, we also need progressive taxation on wealth, including ending corporate taxation avoidance and using some of the €7 billion owed by Apple to the State to relieve the housing and homelessness crisis.

It is outrageous that we are talking about this a month after the election and that nothing has been, and nothing is being, done. I sense the frustration of the people in the Visitors Gallery and those in my community who are faced with the same sort of evictions, overcrowding and homelessness.

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