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

I wanted to address the Minister directly as I will quote from some comments he recently made to local authorities when he visited them. He stated:

As you finalise your development plan later this year, I would suggest that you ask yourselves a fundamental question: Is this plan going to be a game-changer in terms of unleashing private sector construction on our capital city?

He also said:

We must bear in mind that we will rely on the private sector to build seven or eight out of every 10 houses into the future. It is vital that the private sector gets going in a serious way this year and next.

I will cut to the chase and not waste too much of my time complimenting members for doing the hard work on the report. Well done everybody. I have a genuine fear about the report. It is not irrational. I fear the report will join countless others gathering dust on shelves. I was a councillor for seven years and if I read one report on housing from various agencies and local authorities, I read 1,000 of them. We have probably destroyed a rainforest at this stage. My fear is not cynical or based on an observation that there has been and continues to be a lack of political will on the part of the establishment parties - Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, Labour and, in the past, the Green Party - to really grasp the nettle and allow social housing be built on the altar of private profit. One recommendation linked to the report concerns rent certainty. It is not that long ago that Sinn Féin put a motion to the House to introduce rent certainty and both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael voted against it. That proves my point a little.

Emphasis is being put on the supply side in terms of what we need but that means we are examining the supply side in the interests of the developers. This relates to creating the free market conditions that will allow the same developers to have sufficient profit so they will actually bother to build houses. It means we will provide major subsidies to developers and their need for profit. The chief executive officer of NAMA, Mr. Brendan McDonagh, has indicated that many developers are not satisfied with a €20,000 profit on a €300,000 house as they would rather wait until the prices rise to a point at which they can profit to the tune of approximately €50,000 on each house. The Minister, Deputy Coveney, stated that much will depend on how quickly the private sector will deliver.

I place emphasis on what was said earlier. We are making the same mistakes and it is the definition of lunacy. We are doing the same thing we did the last time, namely, failing and doing it again. Having gone through a failed market cycle built on concessions to developers and builders - the Galway tent, corruption and everything that went with it - we are repeating the same mistake in the middle of a housing emergency. Social housing has been consistently and deliberately driven down by consecutive Governments since the dawn of neo-liberalism, going right back to the late 1980s. That is why we are in our current state. We are concentrating on lowering costs to developers so as to ensure they have enough profit. We are giving them funding rebates on development levies and infrastructure work that is done by local authorities before they commence work. We are reducing VAT rates and the Part V obligation rate from 20% of housing to 10% of housing.

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We have reduced apartment sizes and aspect requirements on apartments to allow them to build more. We have lessened and loosened regulations around building in order to ensure there is enough profit for them, despite having been through Priory Hall and Longboat Quay, to mention just two. We have studied how to get around Central Bank rules so that people can borrow enough to pay a high enough amount to buy a home and to ensure there is enough profit for developers. We set up special funding bodies, often allied to dubious private equity firms and vulture funds. We have legislated for REITs and safeguarded sufficient profit to encourage them to build and rent to our citizens at very high costs. We have resisted any attempts to strengthen rights or security of tenure for tenants.

All of this is to breathe into the market again the life that is missing from it, for builders, developers, estate agents and the whole legal and financial "nine yards", as it is termed, that goes with housing and property development, as we have done in the past with the Galway tent. I am sorry the Minister has left the Chamber because when I look over at him talking about this issue, I am reminded of Frankenstein and how he, as a doctor, tried to breathe life into the monster he created, shouting at it, “Live, live, live!” That is exactly what this Government and Fianna Fáil are trying to do with the housing market by going back to the private market and saying, “Please live, live, live and we will throw everything at you to do so”. For the 140,000 citizens in housing need, for the 6,000 homeless tonight, many of them children, and for those facing rent hikes beyond their means, the housing market is the monster. Far from breathing life into the system that has crippled this country before, we should be burying it. We should bury it and start to do what everybody agrees needs to be done, ,that is, build social housing, deliver rent controls, give security to tenants and socialise what is an essential social need for all our citizens, who should have a right to it.

I was reminded today of an article Fintan O’Toole wrote. If I can find it I will quote it because he is quite funny in it. When he was a child, in 1949, his family was allocated a house in Crumlin. Thinking back on it, he was asking how in the name of God in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s this State could deliver social housing. He talks about looking at statistics for exports. We boast about how great our exports are , how they are lifting our economy, and we export all sorts of wonderful things nowadays. In 1949, the official statistics for export show that the principal export products included “fellmongery, laces, pigs’ heads, pollard and snuff”. I know pollards are some kind of animals without horns. Imagine the economy that was able to build 50,000 social houses in the 1940s while it was exporting snuff and pigs’ heads. Yet, we cannot do it today. It is because we lack the political will.

Social mix is always talked about in terms of Ballymun, Ballyfermot or Finglas. How about talking about social mix in Foxrock? It never seems to bother anybody that there is no social mix in the very wealthy areas.

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