Ruth Coppinger (Dublin West, Solidarity) | Oireachtas source

It is unfortunate that this Bill is being debated on the day that the Leo and Simon show is dominating the attention of the media, where a press event to discuss and highlight the Bill was not attended because the media were busy elsewhere. The reason I mention it is that the new leaders of Fine Gael will have a huge responsibility in housing, which is the biggest social crisis in this country, bar none. I also wonder if the Minister of State has any advice, or if either Deputy Coveney as Minister for Housing, Planning, Community and Local Government, or Deputy Varadkar as it is in his constituency, have any advice for the 30 families who last week in Blanchardstown had their lives torn apart when a fire engulfed 30 apartments that they were living in.

Those 30 families have now joined the general homeless blackspot that Blanchardstown is and has been for a number of years. Furthermore, the private rental market in particular which the Minister of State keeps on lauding, as he did in his speech today, means that as private renters they are thrown to the wolves. Owner-occupiers are covered by the management company insurance and will be facilitated with having accommodation subsidised, as are anyone on housing support, but the biggest group of people, who are privately renting, are not covered by that insurance. Landlords are covered by the insurance if they happened to lose out on rental income as a result of the fire. That is a loophole which I would ask the Minister of State to seriously address. I raise it here because these people are facing rents of up to €2,250 per month which are being sought in the Castleknock area, where most of them will end up looking. There are 21 two-bed properties in the whole of Dublin 15 listed on daft.ietoday, so along with hundreds of other families, those families have now been thrown into the mix. If they were living on a street in certain parts of the constituency, Deputies would have swarmed like locusts around it, but because they are privately renting and many of them are not Irish, there does not seem to be much interest. No task force has been set up. They were each given cheques for €100 from the Department of Social Protection. That would not get them a night in a bed and breakfast accommodation if they could even find one, never mind the fact that they could not get in to get their clothes, medication and so on.

I wanted to talk about the rent predictability measures that the Minister of State tells us covers everything and so we do not need this Bill. They are simply not working. The rent pressure zones that are covered in the Bill are in respect of a limited number of areas. In Dublin, by the Minister of State's admission, rents have gone up by 13.9% following the imposition of the rent limits. It is pathetic to hear the Minister of State say that the rate of rent price increases has dropped when they have gone up by almost 14%. The rent limits are not, and cannot be, enforced because the Government has put the onus on the desperate tenant, who is in a queue with 40 other people to secure a place to live, to question the landlord. At the time of that Bill, we put forward something that I would have thought was very sensible if one was serious about this. Our proposal was that a certificate ought to be issued by the RTB to the landlord saying that the rent was legal and that any increases were also legal. Instead, the Government put the onus on the tenant to find that out. In a tweet today, the CEO of the RTB said that 85% of rent reviews which were challenged by people to the RTB are invalid. What does that show? That landlords are chancing their arms, they are introducing rent increases that are not legal. When people have the wherewithal to challenge them, they are successful but if they do not have the wherewithal they do not have much hope.

Having put in a lot of work in the special Committee on Housing and Homelessness, I issued a minority in which I put forward the idea of real rent controls where what we need is not merely limits on increases but intervention to bring rents down. How could €2,000 per month be an affordable rent for anybody? We need to bring rents down to a level that people's incomes have been brought down to since the crash in 2011. We should go back to 2011 prices.

I also want to raise something as I am not sure if it has been referred to in the Dáil. I do not know if the Minister of State if aware of the sex for rent advertisements that have recently appeared online. Ten advertisements have appeared on two Irish websites in the last week. I have not heard the Minister of State say much about it but I wonder how he can tell me that things are working when one can see this form of sexual exploitation. Landlords are offering rent-free accommodation, mostly to women, in exchange for sex. Ten advertisements have appeared on Craiglistand Locanto.iewebsites. To give a flavour, in one advertisement, a man in a Dublin suburb says he is looking for a woman for "a two-week trial period", that longer availability is possible, they can do housework and massage in exchange for rent. How desperate does the Minister of State think that people would have to be to avail of that? The man in this advertisement is a single 30 year old and he asks in those contacting him by email to tell him more about themselves, and says that women should preferably be Latin American. In another advertisement, a free bed was offered to a woman who could "look after me".

What is most worrying is that one of these gurriers received 30 replies. What does that tell the Minister of State? That under his Government, people have become so degraded that they would avail of something like this. That is how desperate they are. Organisations have called this effective prostitution because something is being given to people in return for sex, and foreign women, arriving in this country and seeing the rents that are being charged, are most likely to take this up.

The housing crisis is not better, it is worse. The Government's key policy plank now is gifting public land to private developers to get trickle-down housing or paying for essential infrastructure to get building started. The Government announced €200 million recently but it has not even sought guarantees that there will be affordable housing in these projects. The Dublin Inquirerthis week gives the example of Cherrywood, where 8,000 new homes are planned and the Government set aside €15 million for the upgrade of roads and bridges. Normally a developer would have to pay a key chunk to upgrade a road to get a development built, that would be in the planning permission, but Hines developers have not been able to say how much affordable housing will be in that project. In an email on 10 May it said it would be 10% in line with the legal rate that everyone is obliged to provide but on 3 April, the Minister, Deputy Coveney, claimed that local authorities had received commitments from housing developers with regard to affordability. The Government has not received any commitments at all. I strongly suspect that we will be looking at tribunals about this largess in the not-too-distant future, where the Government is doling out taxpayers' money to these developers in order to get this trickle-down housing, if we even manage that.

Fine Gael is looking increasingly like callous Tories where they seem oblivious to the real suffering that is taking place in the real world outside of the Leo and Simon show. Two funds that we have in this country have money. Both the Minister for Finance, Deputy Michael Noonan, and the Taoiseach have said that money is not the issue. There are two funds, the Irish Strategic Investment Fund and NAMA, that both have up to €7 billion in cash. We could use those funds to build social and affordable housing schemes. Deputy Gino Kenny is correct, the Government has an allergy to social housing and it is demonising people in social housing and has been for months. Why not raise the eligibility for local authority housing and allow middle income workers, lower paid workers, live alongside people who qualify for social housing?

Why not bring in an affordable mortgage scheme, for which the Government has been asked countless times? It does not exist in any local authorities. There is no reason that is the case, because they existed in the past. Why not let people who do not qualify for social housing live in the same areas as other people and get affordable mortgages?

We could have good estates with proper infrastructure, green spaces and well-planned schools, as I have seen elsewhere, built by the State. Unfortunately, ideology is the problem. The Government has already set its face against public housing and challenging the restrictions on it, and will again give largesse to the private sector.

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