Mick Wallace (Wexford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

First off, when the 20% rule was brought in a while back, some people criticised it, but I did not. I thought it was a good idea, as it would help avoid the pitfalls that so many people fall into when it comes to property. They spend too much to keep a roof over their heads. Of course, it did mean that it would be harder for a lot of people to get onto the property ladder.

The alternative was for the State to provide affordable housing, but this has not happened. The measures introduced by the State to deal with the housing crisis are not dealing with it. It has been a bonanza for investment funds and vulture funds. Our landlords are getting bigger in the sense of the number of units they can hold. There is still nothing in the world to stop developers from sitting on valuable land, watching the price of it go up. We have been talking about addressing that issue for the past five or six years, but it is still not addressed. There are huge problems with everything we are doing in terms of the provision of housing.

The Government introduced a help-to-buy scheme, which already drove up prices. This will drive them up as well. We are talking about letting NAMA build 20,000 houses that will cost approximately €330,000 each. Why does the Government not empower local authorities to build houses on the State-owned land NAMA is working on instead? They could build affordable and social houses on these sites so that people could buy them at an affordable price. This new rule of the Central Bank's will only drive up prices as well.

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