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

I am just telling the Minister that he has to reach the point at which he acknowledges that the market cannot be allowed to set rents, because the market is setting rents that are absolutely unaffordable for the vast majority of people. If there is no recognition of that, we are going nowhere.

The situation is worse. The first time I brought homeless people to the Dáil was in 2012. I brought in about ten or 15 families. I warned then there was a crisis and the then Government laughed at me because, at that time, for a very brief period, rents were decreasing, as were property prices. I warned then - because in Dún Laoghaire they did not go down - that they were going back up everywhere and that there would be a crisis in a year or two. I was laughed at by the former Minister, Mr. Pat Rabbitte, and others.

In Dún Laoghaire now it is disastrous. Rents for a three-bedroom house are €2,200 on average. That has nearly doubled in the past two years. The HAP scheme is a write-off - it will not happen in Dún Laoghaire. Unless we ratchet up the provision of social housing and scale back rents to affordable levels that are related to people's income, we are going nowhere. Even the most cursory examination of the situation in parts of this city would tell the Minister that. He needs to get with reality.

The Minister needs to stop with the mantra of the market. I do not know what this obsession is. The Minister is still referring to the 75,000 units he will deliver through the HAP scheme. It will not happen. I also hear ideological claptrap that supply will solve the problem. Does anybody's memory stretch back even to 2006 and 2007? We had supply to beat the band. Did it make rents affordable or property prices affordable? No. Supply does not bring rent down and it does not bring property prices down. We know that from 2006, 2007 and 2008. It did not do it. We had the biggest level of supply in the history of the State, and rent and property prices went up because the people who were building them were interested in profit and the market was setting the rate. So even if the supply is increased via the private for-profit sector, I guarantee it will not solve the problem. Without controlled and subsidised low rents and housing, including affordable housing - I heard mention of the squeezed middle - we will not solve the problem. We should support any measure that moves us in that direction, but we need to go a lot further.

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