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

I thank Deputy Wallace for putting forward this Bill. People Before Profit will support it.

I thank the Deputy for highlighting, once again, the obscene issue of land-hoarding and property speculation by investors, developers and property speculators of various sorts. Indeed, I tried to do the same with my own motion a couple of weeks ago dealing with different aspects of this same problem. It is important for the public out there to know, and I hope this debate gets a bit of coverage.

We talk often about the human misery of the housing crisis but what is not talked about enough is the flip-side of the coin of that human misery being suffered by so many of our citizens in which a small group of people are making a lot of money out of it and they do not care about the human misery they are causing. The more human misery they cause, the more money they make. The more desperate the situation gets in terms of the unaffordability of housing and rents, the more money they make. That is the obscenity of the matter. The Government has not only failed to deal with it, but actively facilitated it. When the history of this period is written, it will show that following the disastrous crash of 2008, the Government - first of Fianna Fáil but continued by Fine Gael - through the policy of NAMA flogged off vast amounts of land and property assets to speculators who have then speculated on that land, hoarded it and generated the crisis that we now face.

I laugh with despair when I hear the Government talking about how well it is doing. Boasting about this, they state planning permissions are up by 27%. Of course, planning permission means nothing other than that the value of that land increases for the landowner. Landowners can then sit on it and do absolutely nothing with it, and that is what they are doing. We only need look at Cairn Homes, for example, sitting on enough land to build 12,000 homes, or 20% of the zoned building land in Dublin. The company built 103 houses in 2016, it built 200 in 2017 and it is talking about ramping up at some point to 1,200 in a couple of years' time. The company is clearly drip-feeding and speculating on the value of property. When one looks at what it builds, it is unbelievable. Albany, in my area, is "Luxury coastal living". Half of it is still empty. The start price, at €890,000, will really solve the housing crisis for us. What about Marianella in Rathgar, with the starting price of €650,000 ranging up to €925,000? Is that affordable? Profiteering is what these people are doing and yet these guys ran off with €26 million in shares last year and shared out €4.1 million in wages, bonuses and pension payments in 2015.

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