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

Faced with an absolutely shameful housing and homelessness emergency, a crumbling health service which is inflicting such hardship and suffering on so many of those who use it, a climate emergency that is galloping towards us, a further education system that is in dire need of investment as our universities tumble in the world rankings, and in a society that is marked by some of the greatest levels of inequality and deprivation in the western world, this budget is a complete non-event. It does not scratch the surface of the most serious and pressing social issues facing huge numbers of our citizens.

The failure to address the housing crisis adequately is the most disappointing aspect of this budget. Some 10,000 people are living in emergency accommodation, including 4,000 children whose childhoods are being stolen from them due to the failure of the Government's policies. It is a shameful situation. There are 140,000 families, adding up to 500,000 people, on the housing list at the moment with almost no hope of ever getting a council house. Some 70,000 families are in serious mortgage distress, and a whole generation of young people have no prospect of ever being able to afford a home of their own and who can barely afford to pay the extortionate rents on offer in the private rental market at the moment. Faced with that emergency, and following the enormous demonstration that occurred last week, one would have thought that this Government would have done something dramatic and radical to address the situation and its policy failures in this area, but it has done nothing. It can spin the figures as much as it likes, but if one parses what the Minister said, he has not broken from the failed Rebuilding Ireland plan in the slighted. Rebuilding Ireland promises 9,540 new social housing units in 2019. Not all of those are council housing. The Minister said today that that dismal figure will increase to 10,000. The target is increasing by 460. Will that dismal target be met? If one looks at the target for 2018 one discovers that in all four Dublin county councils, in the first six months of this year a grand total of 203 council houses have been delivered, including 16 in Dublin itself. There are 20,000 families on the list in Dublin and 16 houses have been delivered for the city. There are 40,000 people on the housing list in the four Dublin county councils and only 203 council houses have been delivered. That is not even close to the target the Government set, which is itself a dismal target that will not even scratch the surface, in circumstances where there are 144,000 families on the housing list nationwide. It is pathetic, and an insult to the people in emergency accommodation and to children whose lives are being wrecked by this crisis.

The Government has not acknowledged that Rebuilding Ireland is a failure. However, it has given an additional €121 million in housing assistance payments, HAP, to private landlords who are creaming in the profits on the backs of the misery of those suffering from this crisis. To add insult to injury, the Government wants to give landlords more tax relief on the moneys they borrow to buy into the private rental sector. That is extremely shocking. Landlords will be given a tax break so that they can buy properties they can rent in this disastrous rental market, or refurbish existing properties. Nobody has mentioned this, but the incentive to refurbish existing properties will incentivise the evictions we have already seen, where landlords exploit loopholes in the residential tenancies legislation. Landlords will get tax breaks if refurbishments are carried out, which justifies the eviction of tenants. One of the major reasons tenants are being evicted is so that so-called substantial refurbishments can be carried out. The Government is now incentivising this and providing landlords with the justification to evict more people. It is unbelievable. I am not sure whether the Minister of State was following the case in Sandyford that I was involved in during the week, which demonstrated how these loopholes are being exploited by Ires REIT which was invited here by the Government and which is now one of the biggest corporate landlords in the State. It bought property from NAMA for a song, and this week it tried to exploit a loophole left in the legislation to increase the rents of their tenants in Sandyford's Beacon South Quarter by 25% to 35%. The average rental price of the units in that development is €2,200, and the proposals would have seen that increase to €2,800. I met the residents, and I could not believe they were paying €2,200. I was shocked at that. Who can afford €2,200 a month in rent? Still, Ires REIT wanted to increase the price to €2,800, and the Government has allowed a loophole that would permit such an increase.

Because of the bad publicity and because we jumped up and down about it in here, the next day Ires REIT phoned all of those people and said they would withdraw the rent increases. It shows that people power works. However the loophole is still there, and now the Government is creating an incentive to exploit another one. It is unbelievable and is shocking in the extreme.

The Government's targets are dismal and the additional money the Minister has allocated is pathetic compared with the problem but it will not even deliver any substantial number of extra units next year. The Government is sticking to the Rebuilding Ireland plan, which has failed disastrously. That is a grim prospect for the people in homeless and emergency accommodation and the families in my area who have been waiting for up to 20 years on the housing list. This year there was a slight increase in the amount of council housing in our area. However there is not even completed planning permission that could produce more than eight units in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown next year. Even these targets, which are dismal and are never met, will not be delivered. It really is grim.

The affordable housing scheme also is an absolute joke. Because of the ten years during which the Government stopped building, we need 35,000 housing units to be built per year to deal with the demand for housing that will develop in the next several years. Under Rebuilding Ireland, the Government is planning to build 6,000 directly next year, with another 2,000 under this affordable scheme. That will not actually be next year but the year after. I repeat: only 2,000 affordable housing units, plus 6,000 or 7,000 units, against a demand for 35,000. It is not even one third of the requirement. The Government is relying on the private sector to deliver the rest. The private sector is hoarding and speculating and is not building in the required numbers. What it is building is completely unaffordable in any event. This miserable drop in the ocean of an affordable scheme of 2,000 units per year, starting the year after next, will not be affordable in the areas where the housing crisis is most acute. A 40% discount on the market rate in areas like south or north Dublin where property prices are now off the charts means they will not be affordable. The affordable houses will not be affordable for people on lower and middle incomes.

That conundrum is also the reason nothing is moving on the public land on which we should be building. Every single local authority in the Dublin area is bogged down in interminable arguments about how to get the balance right between public, private, affordable and council housing. Big rows are going on and nothing is moving. Insofar as anything is moving, Fine Gael councillors in south Dublin, Dún Laoghaire and elsewhere are actually arguing for the sale of public land. That is what the Government is doing. There is all this spoof about public and affordable housing, but yesterday in south Dublin, Fine Gael councillors voted to sell off 70% of publicly-owned land to the private sector. In Dún Laoghaire last night, our councillors put down a motion opposing the sale of land near Stillorgan that has been designated for Traveller accommodation for the past ten years. They also put down a motion saying that public land in Georges Place in Dún Laoghaire should not be sold. Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil councillors said we should sell it. They advocated selling off land that was designated for Traveller accommodation to private developers. The idea that the Government will deliver public and affordable housing is just spoof. Fine Gael is busy using the crisis as an excuse to privatise public land to benefit the party's landlord friends and the vulture funds and corporate landlords it invited into the country. As if all that is not a big enough insult, Fine Gael has done nothing about the tax loopholes it created, which mean those entities will pay no tax on the rental income and the capital gains they are making.

This really is a scandal, and I am going to keep jumping up and down about it until somebody investigates it. For the last three years, I have been tabling questions asking how much tax is forgone to the section 110 tax relief that has been given to all the vulture funds, asset management firms and corporate landlords Fine Gael brought in after 2012. We cannot get an answer. To me that is a scandal. Tax reliefs worth billions are going to Ires REIT, Kennedy Wilson and Lone Star Funds and when I ask the Minister for Finance how much it costs the State, he does not know. He will not give an answer. It is unbelievable. Were those firms paying their taxes, we could invest that money in building public and affordable housing.

I must say a word about Fianna Fáil on this point. Last week, Fianna Fáil supported the motion of the Raise the Roof campaign calling for an additional minimum €1 billion in investment in the direct construction of public and affordable housing on public land. In this budget, which Fianna Fáil is now apparently going to allow to pass, there is less than a quarter of that. It will not even scratch the surface. Fianna Fáil has already made a U-turn on a commitment made in front of the country last week. That is undemocratic. It is an absolutely unbelievable betrayal of the people who came out on the street last week, and far more importantly, an unbelievable betrayal of the people who are being engulfed by the social emergency which is the housing crisis. It is shocking but not terribly surprising.

In the area of health, the Government has plugged the overrun with additional funds from windfall corporate tax receipts and has invested an extra €1 billion. At least that is going some way towards addressing the crisis. Obviously I welcome the additional funding in the areas of mental health and so on. However there is a big problem with all this. The mental health budget needs additional funds. It is less than what Mental Health Reform asked for and it is still a significantly smaller percentage of the health budget than the European average. It is 8% rather than the 12% that is needed. The critical problem is that even if the Government allocates this money, unless it can get the staff in mental health services and can get nurses to work in the accident and emergency units and hospitals, it will not make any difference. This is the problem. This is why we cannot open the beds. This is why child and adolescent mental health services, CAMHS, are not functioning.

We cannot get the staff to work in the health service because the Government will not pay them properly. This budget has done nothing to address that. Do you know how much the average nurse is going to get as a result of the taxation charges, a Cheann Comhairle? Let us strip out what was given back in the miserable commitments made heretofore, which are not the full pay restoration, abolition of the financial emergency measures in the public interest, FEMPI, provisions and re-establishment of pay equality that was sought. How much will the average nurse on starting pay get? The answer is 71 cent a week. That is some incentive to stop nurses leaving this country. Nurses will not work in our health service because the wages are not sufficient to put a roof over their heads and there is chaos in the public health system. This is going to change nothing. We are not going to get the required level of recruitment. I could say the same about education. We have a real problem in recruiting people into the health service to create capacity. At the end of the day, the health service is mostly about the human beings working in it, nurses and doctors. If one does not have them, one can allocate the money but it does not make any difference. We must pay the nurses and the other healthcare workers to come back and work in the system, and the Minister has not done that in this budget because the Government is still trying to exploit the financial emergency.

Is it not incredible? No housing emergency was declared but the Government is still extending the emergency that allows it to slash the pay of public sector workers. It is the longest emergency legislation in the history of the State, and this is after the financial emergency was declared over.

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