Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank Independents4Change, the Labour Party, the Anti-Austerity Alliance-People Before Profit, the Social Democrats, the Green Party and others not only for supporting this Bill, but for co-signing it, which sends a very important signal to the other parties in the House and to the public. I would also like to congratulate the Secure Rents campaigners and urge them to keep up the campaigning activities in which they have been involved in the run up to the publication of the Government's strategy.

I would like to respond to some of the comments of the Minister for Housing, Planning, Community and Local Government, Deputy Simon Coveney, and of Deputies from Fianna Fáil. The Minister is correct that no political party has a monopoly on compassion and nobody from Sinn Féin has suggested otherwise. Compassion will not solve this crisis; correct policies from the Government will. The Minister believes he has a comprehensive strategy, but Sinn Féin disagrees. There is no doubt that there is a strategy but it is reliant on the same fundamental policy flaws of previous Governments, namely, an over reliance on the private sector to deliver social and affordable housing and an under investment in proper public housing. The Minister can say as often as he wants that there will be a 50% increase in capital investment next year but all this Government is doing is reversing the cuts the Fine Gael Party introduced when it first came into office in 2011.

The Minister questioned our commitment to his process. It is not our process but we are engaging with it constructively. We make detailed submissions, we engage in committees and so forth but we have a right, if not a responsibility, to raise issues on the floor of the Dáil and attempt to exert pressure on the Government to do things that we believe it would not otherwise do and I make no apology for that. As for playing politics, the reality for struggling renters and homeless people is not a game and there is nobody on this side of the Chamber who is attempting to play politics.

When the Minister came into the Chamber earlier, he suggested that Sinn Féin's problem is that we do not have enough patience. I would have some sympathy with that argument if the Minister was only six months in office but he sat at the Cabinet table when the last Government refused to introduce the rent certainty measures that the Labour Party was rightly arguing for at that time. I presume, because he did not say anything to the contrary, that he blocked the former Minister, Deputy Alan Kelly, from introducing the kinds of measures that Sinn Féin is currently proposing. He has had plenty of time to introduce those very measures.

The central problem here is that Fine Gael is against rent certainty. The idea that the cause of the crisis is a mismatch between supply and demand ignores the fact that during the boom when we had the greatest supply of rental properties in the history of the State rents continued to rise. This is good legislation which anybody who is serious about tackling the rental crisis would support.

As for Fianna Fáil, the first thing I would point out is that the amendment that party proposed cannot be tabled. Deputy Barry Cowen is around long enough to know that but he wanted the cover of the amendment to justify opposition to the Bill. What is more remarkable is the fact that Fianna Fáil Deputies supported the three measures in this Bill when they sat on the Oireachtas Committee on Housing and Homelessness only a few months ago. One Deputy suggested that we had not put enough time and effort into this. We spent seven weeks at that committee and had hours of hearings with experts in the rental sector, with constitutional lawyers and so on. We listened to all of their advice and agreed the three recommendations in this Bill, unanimously. All of a sudden Fianna Fáil no longer thinks that the proposals its Deputies supported in June are credible policies to support in legislation.

The real problem is that Fianna Fáil has nothing to say on security of tenure. It does not even mention it in its amendment, despite the fact that it makes up two thirds of the Bill, and it is not willing to support rent certainty either. There is no point in Deputies coming into the House and saying they will support it if, when it comes to voting on it, they vote against it, not once, not twice but three times. Tomorrow will be the third time they will have opposed this measure.

I want to deal with the issue that the measures in this Bill will hurt landlords and hurt supply, neither of which is backed up by any evidence. The rental yields currently in the Irish market are the highest in the European Union so capping rents with the consumer price index now will have no negative impact on future supply. In fact, when I talk to landlords, and Sinn Féin is not anti-landlord as we want good quality landlords operating in the market, they tell us that security of tenure and security of rent over a long period is better for them because many of them suffered when prices crashed at the start of the recession and would have liked to have rent certainty during that period.

We have debated these issues at great length in the Committee on Housing and Homelessness and in this Chamber. There is compelling evidence from academic experts, international best practice and our own knowledge of the rental market that these three measures will make a real difference. Will they solve all the problems in the rental market? Of course they will not, and in the detailed submission Sinn Féin made to the rental strategy review of the Minister, Deputy Coveney, which we will publish next week, we have made many other proposals. However, if these measures had been introduced when Sinn Féin proposed rent certainty last June, fewer families would be homeless and families would not be paying the jacked up rents they are now paying. If we were to agree the security of tenure measures, fewer families would become homeless in the coming months and fewer families and children would be living in emergency accommodation.

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