Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

Tá tallann faoi leith ag teastáil chun óráid a dhéanamh do sheomra atá folamh, ach is dócha go bhfuil na daoine is tábhachtaí in Áiléar na gCuairteoirí agus sa bhaile ag breathnú ar an teilifís. Buíochas le Dia go bhfuil an rud seo ag dul amach chucu. Táim buíoch as ucht na deise caint faoin mBille Airgeadais. I have to agree with my colleague Deputy Richard Boyd Barrett that it is unjust, unfair and an absolute waste of a golden opportunity. We were all elected to look at matters in a different way. I have repeatedly said in this Chamber that we were not asked to reduce taxes. It is an insult to have a debate around the budget as to how to deal with a fiscal space in terms of a tiny reduction in the USC which put a euro or two into workers' pockets, as opposed to looking at the fiscal space and the other uncollected taxes that we require in order to provide services.

The week before last at the Committee of Public Accounts, the Department of Social Protection made a presentation on its budget, which is, I think, €19.7 billion or €19.9 billion. In the course of that debate, it was established that for the figures available in 2014, 40% of this country would be living in poverty without social welfare payments. Yet, the debate around social welfare is not that 40% of the social welfare comes directly from the Social Insurance Fund and the other 60% from our taxes but it is around fraud in social welfare, even though that occupies a minute part of the social welfare budget.

I brought in a newspaper into the meeting and I have brought it with me again today, and I am coming back to the Finance Bill in terms of tax evasion. I have here the local paper,Connacht Tribune, with a headline referring to a crackdown on fraudsters and an article mentioning actual gardaí on the street stopping cars and trucks in Galway to curb social welfare fraud and tax evasion. Of course, that is for the ordinary person. We are talking about hundreds of thousands of euro there, or a million or two at a maximum. We compare that to the massive tax evasion that is being referred to by those of us proudly on the left and those in Sinn Féin who have highlighted the issue. My colleague, Deputy Broughan, has paid tribute to the three Deputies in particular who have highlighted the misuse of section 110 and other tax loopholes. It is from that type of new politics on this side of the House that the debate has slightly changed and has focused the Government's attention in a minimal way on dealing with tax evasion, somehow trying to change the díospóireacht into what will make us a more equal country and stopping what Deputy Burton referred to when she said that we "reluctantly" pay tax. I proudly pay tax. Anybody I know proudly pays tax, but what we are looking for in return are services. We are looking for a health service and for housing.

That takes me directly to the Finance Bill itself and to section 8 on the grant for first-time buyers. Just about every economist in the country has said that this will add to the price of houses. They have already been quoted. Davy stockbrokers has revised upwards its growth forecast. It expects house prices to grow at a rate of 7% rather than 5%. In the rental sector, the secure rents campaign has come together, made up of five unions and the Uplift online campaign, and is absolutely begging the Government to interfere in the rental market because the prices and the rents are rising by up to 40%. Again, there are absolutely no measures in this Finance Bill to deal with that, which is bad enough, because there are no simple solutions. However, I would have expected a debate about the housing crisis and the rise in rents that are just astronomical. Before taking Galway as an example, I will give an up-to-date figure from Savills. Almost a million people, or to be precise, 856,100 people, are now relying utterly on the private rental sector. That is 856,100 people with absolutely no security of tenure and with rents going up on a daily basis.

I want to mention research by Dr. Padraic Kenna in Ollscoil na hÉireann, Gaillimh. He pointed out the rate of evictions for non-payment of rent is higher than that of evictions for non-payment of mortgage. While mortgage arrears are certainly in crisis, evictions for rent arrears are higher and more acute but there is absolutely nothing in the Bill to deal with them.

Not alone this, but the measures will actually worsen the housing crisis, if this is possible. I do not stand here to give a doomsday scenario, I stand here on the basis of experience, having been elected to Galway City Council in 1999 and having watched the waiting list increase month on month and year on year. The reason for this is each Government, be it Fianna Fáil, the PDs, Fine Gael or the Labour Party, has been utterly reliant on the private market, which got us into the mess in the first place. We have a false debate about those on the left not supporting the private market. There is a role for the private market, but not free reign.

I will take Galway as a microcosm of the country with regard to the latest housing quarterly report issued at the end of October. I use these figures not to be parochial but to make a point as to how the housing crisis is getting worse and worse despite the Rebuilding Ireland document and the roadshow, to which I refer as a circus, travelling the country with the Minister, Deputy Simon Coveney. Prior to this we had the former Minister, Deputy Alan Kelly, with the same type of bombastic rhetoric, not dealing with the problem or even analysing it. If we look at Galway, the last time a social house was built in Galway was 2009. Yes, there have been houses under the voluntary schemes, but the last time we had a direct build was 2009.

We are now in 2016 and no house was built this year. Next year there is a plan for 14 houses as part of an overall scheme of approximately 60 houses. Permission was given under Part VIII in my time for those houses. The question must be asked as to why they have not been built. I understand that somewhere between Galway City Council and the Department of Housing, Planning, Community and Local Government lies the truth. It seems the Department has told the city council to go back and look again at whether more houses can be built on the site and we have a delay for some reason. I would have expected a Minister to ask the city council to tell him or her what land it has zoned residential, precisely where the land is, what planning permissions are extant on it and what needs to be done, with the local authority, to build the houses. This would be a practical approach.

Without a social housing build we will have a housing crisis. Yes, we need the private market, as I have said, but we need direct build by the city council of a mixture of houses. This was done in the past, which is why we kept the housing crisis at bay until such time as we stopped it and took the councils out of it. Under the guise of rhetoric, the Minister and the Government state there is a massive social housing build. There is not. The budget gives €110 million to the housing assistance payment scheme, €137 million to rent allowance and €200 million for infrastructural projects, which really means we will ask private developers to do us a favour and take over and build on the land we zoned residential and bought when the market was booming. The Finance Bill, under various measures including the first-time buyer grant which is a direct benefit to the landlord, will once again rely utterly on the private market, which caused the problem in the first place.

In Galway city as we speak, 4,720 households are on the waiting list. There is much talk about Dublin. At a conservative estimate, the 4,720 households in Galway mean that somewhere between 13,000 and 15,000 people in a city of 72,000 have been on a waiting list for a house since 2002. We are told the only game in town is the housing assistance payment and in the budget a phenomenal figure was added to what was already there to fund the housing assistance payment. What this means for the ordinary people listening and watching is they are taken off the waiting list and put into a private house with no security of accommodation. They move at the whim of the landlord from the east to the west of the city, they move their children from school, and they have all of the other consequences of the lack of tenure and security.

Even worse than this, we use limited staff resources to administer it in Galway. The only delay on rolling it out is due to the lack of staff. When people go on the housing assistance payment scheme they are taken off the waiting list. What is going on is a massaging of waiting list figures and a failure to deal with the housing crisis. Rather than having a housing waiting list we will have a huge transfer list. Nobody in the Government has looked at the equity or legal basis of this, nor how somebody in receipt of a housing assistance payment might get priority to go into a local authority house when a landlord sells a house.

According to the quarterly report, 36 families are staying in for profit hotels or hostels and various other bed and breakfasts throughout Galway city. There are 32 such families at any given time in Galway city. When they turn up, and rightly so, to declare themselves homeless at the city council offices, the staff are under pressure to house them. When an empty local authority house becomes vacant the chances are they might get it because of the pressure. Therefore, complete inequality is built into the service between those who have been waiting patiently since 2002 and those who get into difficulty, and our hearts go out to them, who turn up homeless. We have a complete mess regarding a just and equitable allocation scheme.

A measure of the difficulty is seen in the rent a room scheme, which has increased to €14,000. One would imagine that at some stage we would think rationally and logically and state how will we bring in a budget to help reduce the housing crisis, bring in public transport, and look at long-term unemployment and indigenous industry, which is equally as important as foreign direct investment. However, we seem to go down the road all of the time of tinkering with the system and when the Government is forced by the Opposition to do something it does so in the most minimal of ways. For example, with regard to section 54, it is giving a break until 1 May which, significantly, is workers' day. The Government is giving the big tax evaders a break, and introducing it on workers' day, 1 May 2017. If this is not ironic I do not know what is. I take this opportunity, without any hesitation, to use my voice to say this is a most unequal budget and I will not support the Finance Bill, although it has some good measures to which I referred in a previous speech and I will return to them.

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