Fiona O'Loughlin (Kildare South, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I am happy to say a few words on this crisis and to support in principle the Private Members' motion introduced by the Green Party. There is no doubt that the rental crisis threatens to hollow out communities, villages and towns and is putting households under severe strain. The Government should cease its delays on cost-rental models and put in place a broader strategy to address the rental crisis. Many people ask why can we not consider the Scandinavian and German models. The main difference between those models and ours is that tenants in those countries have rent certainty and surety. They also have tenure. People there know that if they are happy with the home they are renting, they have the opportunity to stay there for a long time. While I accept that the private market cannot be controlled, the Government could do more to support the tenants. I do not suggest that we should be anti-landlord because we need them in the current system in which the local authorities are not addressing the crisis by building houses.

Banks need to be brought into the debate. This morning, a constituent contacted me. He is a young man whose partner sadly died last year and he has three small children. The local authority is paying HAP for his house. HAP can be a good system but in this case, the banks are taking the property from the landlord and the tenant has three weeks to leave the house. Surely we can find a better system than one in which a bank will take back a property that will possibly be boarded up, leaving a young man and his three very young children trying to find alternative accommodation, which is practically non-existent in Kildare at present.

At present, 325,000 households are renting private accommodation. The current system mitigates against both those who are renting privately and those who rent through the local authority. We need something that supports both elements of the market. Dare I say we also need a system that takes on board what a couple or single person is paying out in rent for credit approval from a bank or financial institution when buying their own property? The data from the fourth quarter of 2017 show that rents have risen for 22 consecutive quarters. This upswing has not only lasted significantly longer than the preceding downturn but also longer than the upswing before that downturn, which lasted from mid-2004 until early 2008.

There have been huge delays in addressing this issue. We need immediate action.

See this speech in context