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

The Minister, Deputy Eoghan Murphy, said that this debate should not be personalised and that it should be about policy. For the people who need solutions, it is intensely personal. For the people in homeless accommodation, on housing lists for more than a decade, in mortgage distress, priced out of the market, in overcrowded conditions, living with three or four generations in one house and living in poor quality housing, it is very personal. There are many people in despair over their personal circumstances.

I am currently dealing with a couple who have eight children and are living in a HAP tenancy in Clonee even though they are from Dún Laoghaire. This is the third HAP-RAS tenancy they have been in. A few four-bedroom houses have come on-stream in Dún Laoghaire but it does not look like they are going to get one of them. Despite pleading with the council, it is not looking good. This family has been through a tough time. This is just one story. I deal with dozens of similar cases every week. This is personal for those people. They need solutions, they need them fast and they need to be real solutions.

The Minister appealed for us not to be ideological and to be practical. I refer him to an advertisement in the property pages relating to the Honeypark site, which was previously in NAMA and given back to Cosgrave. The Government made the decision to give it back to Cosgrave, who it paid to build it out and now Cosgrave is making the money on it. The Government has done the same with other sites. The sale price for these 214 recently completed apartments, which are being sold to international investors, is €95 million, which is €440,000 per three-bedroom apartment and they are not that big. On another property page, there is an advertisement regarding the sale of more than 1,600 apartments, many of them in Honeypark and almost all of them on sites that were in public ownership, namely, NAMA, and given back to developers, which are being sold to international investment funds for €610 million, which is just under €400,000 per unit. Many of the apartments are three-bedroom, which the investment funds are renting to people in Dún Laoghaire at between €2,400 and €2,800 per month. A number of them are being rented to Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council. This is a joke.

Further up the road, there is another site, Cherrywood, which was also in the hands of NAMA but was returned to Hines. The company has obtained a lot of planning permissions and thus increased the value of the site. It has also flipped some of the site to Cairn Homes. Regarding the 10% of units the company is providing for social housing, it is asking for in excess of €400,000 for some of them. When we had this land in State ownership, via NAMA, the prices were much lower. It is a heist. We give the developers land free of charge and they sell, rent or lease it back to us for a fortune. This is madness.

Who can afford rent of between €2,400 and €2,800 per month? Who can afford to buy the units at €440,000? Virtually nobody, particularly not the people who need council housing. The local authorities also cannot afford to buy them at that price for social housing and people earning up to €80,000 per annum cannot afford to buy them. These units are being bought by investors to rent at extortionate prices, which causes one to think. The Government says that we need these people in the property market to help us. I think we want these people running out of the country screaming because we impose such heavy taxes on them and put such severe rent controls in place they are forced to leave, because only then will house prices drop. We do not need them here. They are driving prices through the roof. They are exploiting the crisis. Because they know the people they are going to rent to cannot afford to buy at this level they can charge these rents. This is the vicious circle we are in.

I commend Deputy Ó Bróin for bringing forth this Bill. We similarly proposed this in the motion that was defeated by the Government. Fianna Fáil did not vote for it, for which I criticised it heavily at the time, because it liked some of what was proposed but not all of it.

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