Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

Is it not time to simply admit that the Minister, Deputy Coveney's Rebuilding Ireland plan is a total and abject failure that has failed utterly to deal with the escalating housing and homeless emergency? For over a year now, the Government has been talking about this plan as a panacea for the crisis yet day by day, the situation gets worse not better. Today we have highlighted that we have reached a shocking and unprecedented level of 7,100 people in emergency accommodation, including 2,500 children. The housing assistance payment limits, which the Government has put in place and which are a central pillar of its entire so-called solution to the housing crisis, are grossly inadequate for the extortionate rents that are now being charged. In my area and in the whole of south Dublin, there is one one-bedroom apartment within the limits.

There are two two-bedroom residential units within the limits today. That comes against the background of an absolutely disastrous crisis.

To add further insult to all of that, the Government has flogged or allowed to be sold via NAMA and the banks we bailed out vast amounts of property and building land where these companies, which make extortionate profits and pay no tax on them, can jack up rents and make people homeless. In my own area, just before Christmas, on 23 December, a vulture fund that bought an apartment block put up rents in the entire block by up to 175%. That was on the day the legislation was supposed to come into force. The vulture funds doing this are paying no tax. Last year, Cerberus had €77 million in profits but paid €1,900 in tax. Lone Star paid $34.6 million in dividends to shareholders abroad.

The Government has allowed that to happen and its policy has actively facilitated it but now it plans to worsen the issue by selling two thirds of public land in key sites such as Shanganagh Castle in Shankill in my own area, the Oscar Traynor Road site and other publicly owned sites. It will sell virtually the whole of the Irish Glass Bottle site or Cherrywood via NAMA and we will only get 10% back on sites. Will the Minister stop this? Will he stop digging the hole that is causing such misery for people suffering from the housing crisis?

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