Mick Barry (Cork North Central, Anti-Austerity Alliance) | Oireachtas source

When the debate is boiled down, the question is are we to have housing for profit or are we to have housing for people. The reality of what housing for profit looks like becomes clearer every day. The RTE programme last week about vulture funds was a huge eye opener and discussion point throughout the nation.

Let us talk about vulture funds. In December 2015 Cairn Homes, backed by Lone Star, bought 20% of all residential development land in Dublin from Ulster Bank. This included 6,000 sites in north Dublin which it purchased at a price of €19,000 per site. The price for equivalent batches of land now is €100,000 which adds more than €80,000 to the price of the houses built on that land straight from the get-go. There is a potential profit of €500 million for the capitalist owners simply by means of sale. Who will be the big beneficiaries? Two of them will be the executives, Mr. John Grayken and Mr. Ellis Short, who according to the Sunday Independent rich list are among the 14 billionaires in the State already with a combined wealth of €6.4 billion, having increased by €2 billion in 2015 alone through practices, no doubt, of this sort.

We should listen to the voice of campaigner, Fr. Peter McVerry, who fears that 25,000 people could face evictions with what is coming down the track with distressed mortgages, vulture funds and so on. This week alone, 452 owner-occupiers are in the courts with applications from banks and, increasingly, from unregulated vulture funds such as Mars Capital, for vacant possession. I echo the point made by Deputy Paul Murphy. If we cannot pass a Bill like this to give guarantees to tenants, tenants have every right to take matters into their own hands and emulate the example of what happened in Spain with social movements to resist eviction. They will have the full backing of the Anit-Austerity Alliance-People Before Profit should they feel the need to go down that road.

We could have housing for need. The Minister spoke about the need for supply. What about the massive supply of social housing that is needed to house the people on the waiting lists and to put pressure to bring down rents? The Minister is nodding his head.

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