Mick Wallace (Wexford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

The Minister spoke about buying vacant units. In June this year the Minister, Deputy Coveney, said to us at the Committee on Housing and Homelessness that he would like to see the State buying up properties. He said he would like us to be proactive and look to acquire properties that are not occupied, in particular. Sadly, that has not happened nearly enough. It goes without saying that currently it is cheaper to buy than to build. Given that we have such a terrible homelessness crisis, buying houses is the shortest route to dealing with the problem, but we have not bought anything like enough housing units. I accept it is vacant units that are sought but if one takes the big blocks of houses or apartments that NAMA has been selling, if the State said it wanted 20% of those, it would be found that there have been up to 10% and 20% of empty units in some of the big blocks sold by NAMA. I do not understand for the life of me why the State has not been buying them. I am confident in predicting that the average selling price NAMA received in the past four years is less than €100,000 a unit. We are spending a lot more building housing units.

If we had bought them, we would not have the homelessness figures we have because we would have had units ready to cater for homeless persons. I appreciate that not all of the units were perfectly located, but some of them were. We have not been proactive. It is not like the homelessness crisis started six months ago. It started years ago. I cannot rationalise it and do not understand it. Obviously, there are other factors involved, but our failure to control rising rents is a serious issue. We are not going to control rent increases in taking this approach. The decision to invite the real estate investment trusts here and charge them bugger all in tax has added to the increase in rents which, in turn, is adding to homelessness. The lack of long-term thinking in the past couple of years has been frightening.

See this speech in context