Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I understand, and I am speaking on the amendment to increase rents by 4% each year. In this context, I must give the background as to how the crisis has emerged. The Ceann Comhairle might have a particular interest. Given that we established a Housing Agency to be expert advisers, to advise, predict and help the Government, we must ask what the agency has been doing since it was established in 2010. The Housing Agency says it will "enable increased supply through promotion of quality and sustainability in housing delivery". If I am upsetting or boring the Minister, I apologise. Mechanisms were put in place to prevent a housing crisis and advise the Government that clearly have not worked.

Now, the Minister is here coming up with a solution and, funnily enough, I admire him for standing up for what he believes in, namely, the free market. This is in contrast to Fianna Fáil. The Minister believes the market will supply and that, given that it has difficulties on occasion, the Government must help the market. I can see where the Minister is coming from and his English is very clear on it. My difficulty is that I do not believe it will sort out the problem and I firmly believe it will make it worse. This is not based on opinions that are radically far left but based on what I have seen on the ground, my experience and report of the Think-tank on Action for Social Change, TASC. The Minister has not mentioned the TASC report once. TASC has gone through the Minister's strategy and highlighted all the difficulties with it, based on evidence. I am speaking to the amendment and what the Minister is trying to do which is making the situation 40 times worse.

The land aggregation scheme is part of the solution or the problem, depending on one's view. What is the status of it? Where is all the land that Galway City Council zoned as residential, half of which it gave back to Dublin? It has not even been mentioned in the debate, and it happened in every city council. The Minister says he is not going to hand over public land. He is going to give it in a partnership, and he used the word "leveraging", at a low value so houses can be built to rent. More than 800,000 people are renting, and the local authority share of it is 10%. If the Minister does not think this is a problem and a major part of the crisis, something is seriously wrong.

The legislation should not be dealt with today. It should be put back. We should have a rent freeze for the vacuum that has been created and to send a message to landlords, or we should tie rent increases to the CPI, which I asked for yesterday when there was a difficulty with the mathematical equations. That would be a simple way to deal with this. Instead of having empty statements in January on housing, let us have meaningful input from all of us. We are here to sort out the housing crisis. This is a way to stop any wrong message going out from the House and letting landlords increase rents.

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