Mick Barry (Cork North Central, Solidarity) | Oireachtas source

Dáil Éireann is stuffed full of landlords. The Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil benches groan with them. This Government of landlords can deal with the crisis seriously or it can continue to choose not to deal with it. If it continues until the next general election to do what it is doing to the people on housing, it should expect many more people on the streets protesting and far fewer Government Deputies in the House after the election.

A recent Irish Congress of Trade Unions, ICTU, survey found that one in two young workers has had to borrow or sacrifice another basic need such as food, heating or transportation to pay their rent or mortgage in the past year. The classic Lou Reed album, "New York", includes the track "Dirty Boulevard" which contains the following lyrics:

This room costs $2,000 a month. You can believe it, man, it is true. Somewhere a landlord is laughing until he wets his pants.

Those landlords are not just in New York anymore. They are in Cork, Dublin, Limerick and Galway. They are making bloody fortunes off the backs of those young workers.

I-RES REIT is a landlord that typifies what is going on. It controls 2,608 rented properties. I-RES REIT did not exist before 2013 but it is now Ireland's largest residential property landlord. Fine Gael and the Labour Party legislated to allow real estate investment trusts to operate in Ireland. I-RES REIT set up here and started by buying more than 1,200 apartments on ten sites in 2013 and 2014. Since then, it has ramped up the average rent at every site by between 23% and 40%. In September 2013, for example, it bought 224 apartments at Lansdowne Gate in Drimnagh. Since 2014, it has increased the average rent on these apartments by 40%. At the same time, it bought 102 apartments at Priorsgate in Tallaght. It has increased the rent on the apartments by 31%. Does the Minister know by how much average pay has increased in the same period? It has increased by 7%. Every single penny of that meagre pay increase, and much more besides, is gone paying rent to I-RES REIT.

If rent gouging was not enough, I-RES REIT has also benefitted from a colossal increase in the value of the homes it has bought. It paid €308 million for 1,200 apartments in 2013 and 2014. According to its accounts, it now values those apartments at €410 million, an increase of one third. That is a capital gain of more than €100 million, on top of rent gouging. This is colossal profiteering from the housing crisis.

It gets worse. When he was Minister for Finance, Deputy Michael Noonan introduced an exemption from capital gains tax on properties purchased in 2013 and 2014. The €30 million or more in capital gains tax that would normally arise when I-RES REIT sells these apartments will be lost to the public finances. That €30 million would build nearly 200 new homes.

Nothing would do the Government but to bring in the likes of I-RES REIT. It stated it would create demand and stimulate an increase in supply that would solve the housing crisis.

The housing crisis is escalating. Everywhere we look, we see that the Minister has created a property market that has become a State-sponsored process for the extraction of public moneys and workers' incomes, to be routed to the corporate owners of rental properties. Making housing a product of the marketplace is the Minister's ideology and its failure and that of the Minister are total. A reason we back the motion is the call for rent controls, but linking rents with the consumer price index would not go far enough. Rents are already too high. Real rent controls would mean cutting rents by a significant amount. To achieve this, we need a protest movement which will grow and grow and challenge the power of landlords and the landlords' Government.

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