Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

The vacuum we were told was being created, has been created elsewhere as a consequence of not including areas that should have been included in the first instance. Amendment No. 2 to amendment No. 55 and amendment No. 1 to amendment No. 68 deal with the entire country and with linking rents to the CPI. Someone who is up for a rent review in a high pressure area outside Dublin will be very worried, even with a short delay. The Minister must realise that the delay has to be short.

I do not know what planet the Minister has been living on when it comes to rents. The Government is not known for throwing money around the place when it comes to rents. The housing assistance payment and rent assistance have been paid in respect of a sizeable amount of the housing stock. Approximately one-third if not more of the housing stock would be for people on housing waiting lists but, for example, the housing assistance payment in Cork city for a couple with two children is €925 a month. For the same family type in Kildare, it is €1,050. It is worse than that in Wicklow where it is €1,200. The reason those amounts are different is because there is high pressure on rents in those locations and those rents have been driven up. There is a decent amount of evidence that this is not the extent of the rents being paid and that people are topping up those rents because there is such a high demand for housing in the areas in question.

The commuter belt is spoken about as some sort of small peripheral part of Dublin. I will compare the three counties of Meath, Kildare and Wicklow to the area the Minister would know best, that is, Cork city and county. Those three counties have a greater population than the combined city and county of Cork. When I contested the 2005 by-election in Kildare - another such by-election took place in Meath on the same day - it was a big surprise that child care, for example, was an issue and all of a sudden it got on the political agenda. That is what happens when the Minister does not understand an area. There is no county with a population the size of that which obtains in Kildare that does not have a city in the middle of it. Kildare has a bigger population than that of Limerick city and county combined. The problem is that the thinking about the commuter belt areas is different. I am quite sure the same pressure applies in respect of areas on the peripheries of Cork and Galway. However, I am focusing on the area I know best. We do not get the services when we are on the periphery because the city to which the commuter belt relates is Dublin. There has to be new thinking about those areas. I have come across people who are in bidding wars because there is such a shortage of supply. Those bidding wars will put the most disadvantaged people at an even greater disadvantage. That is part of the reason there must be some baseline and that is why we are talking about the CPI. We are also talking about this measure being extended to the entire country, rather than picking and choosing areas because if there is a market, presumably the market will find its level.

It is vitally important that the Minister gives us certainty with regard to a timeline. It is bad enough that we have that vacuum. I was contacted by a person from Maynooth yesterday who had just been told that his rent will increase by 20%. That is 20% on one of the highest rents to be found in the country. The idea is that advantage will be taken in the vacuum the Minister was talking about trying to avoid. How he could have ignored areas under such pressure makes me question the kind of information available him.

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