Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to participate in this debate and will be supporting the Bill. I wish to place the Bill in context. There are positive things in it but there are other items that need to be dealt with on Committee Stage. The context is, of course, the fact more than one in three of the 10,000 people who are homeless are children. A doctor said recently in the media that when children attend doctors' surgeries, their families come with them because they are homeless. I will have been three years in the Dáil in February. I do not think there is a single month where my colleagues and I have not spoken about housing. We have done this not to be negative. There have been many allegations from the Government side that we are ideologically stuck on something. I am not ideologically stuck on anything. I am a very pragmatic and practical Independent Deputy.

From the minute I entered the House, I, along with my colleagues, pointed out the existence of a housing crisis. Galway is on the same level as Dublin. It is impossible for people to get rental accommodation in Galway. The local authority housing list goes back to 2002. We have a plan for an outer bypass that may or may not go ahead in 2024 or 2025. I have my own view on that. I think public transport would be a far more efficient way to progress things in Galway. I make the point that quite a substantial amount of residential zoned land in Galway has been frozen for a proposed road. I have also mentioned repeatedly that not one single local authority house has been built since 2009 in Galway until very recently.

Deputy Jan O'Sullivan, who has left the Chamber, referred to a crisis, and she is right, but that crisis has been created because this Government and the previous one failed to enter the market as a landlord. There is a very important role for this Government to play. It can act as a landlord through the local authorities and send a message to the market that it is serious about this and that it has a duty to provide homes, be they public homes or affordable housing, although I have doubts about the word "affordable" because when that scheme was introduced in Galway, the houses were certainly not affordable and people were caught. I am more attached to the words "public housing", that there is a duty on the Government to provide housing to balance the market. If we do not balance the market, it will not matter how many pieces of legislation the Government brings before us. We will have a housing crisis and only the landlord class will win.

It is ironic that this debate comes two days after we celebrated 100 years of the first Dáil, which was only 20 or 30 years after the period involving Michael Davitt who lived to 1906. We are nearly back in the same position, looking for security of tenure and the basic rights the Land League was seeking in not the last century but the 19th century. We look at this Bill in that context.

This Bill is part of a jigsaw as a result of pressure from the various Deputies outside the Government who told it from day one that there is a crisis. We have a piece of a jigsaw without an overall picture. If the Minister could come back to the overall picture and tell us how these pieces of the jigsaw fit into it, it would be helpful because I can see no overall picture.

The Minister referred to the documents he produced and Rebuilding Ireland. What I see is an Ireland being rebuilt in the developers' name.

That is what I see in Rebuilding Ireland. I want Ireland rebuilt, but in the name of its citizens with public housing on public land. Every initiative the Minister brings before us is to bolster the market. This Bill relates primarily to the rent pressure zones which the Minister brought in under pressure and which really are not working. They are certainly not working in Galway. We have one year of this limited measure left. It is not clear what is going to happen. Other Deputies have asked for clarification on that.

Student accommodation does not come into this Bill. I note that the Minister is going to come back with amendments. I look forward to his clarifications on that area. Again, it is a major problem in Galway. We have seen students coming forward to us over the past two years highlighting astronomical increases without any justification. I believe that the universities are partly responsible for this because, certainly in Galway, they have gone down the road of more and more buildings while utterly failing to provide sufficient affordable accommodation on campus.

Over the past two years I have participated in many debates on mortgages, mortgage arrears and people losing their homes because of their inability to pay mortgages. All of this time the other problem was people being evicted for failure to pay rent because they simply were not able to do so. We are refusing altogether to look at that.

I welcome that the period for notices to quit is going to be increased. I welcome the yearly registration, although I do not welcome the involvement of money, however small, in that regard. I do not think it is necessary. I do not welcome it being left open to introduce a fee in respect of mediation. I welcome the publication of determination orders, but I do not think the names should be included. I welcome the increased powers given to the Residential Tenancies Board, RTB, in respect of enforcement, although I have concerns relating to the criminal aspect. I look forward to that being teased out on Committee Stage.

We are now in a position to go back to my original point about the Government supporting the market. The housing assistance payment, HAP, was brought in under the previous Government. It is a major part of the problem. We had rent supplement and the rental accommodation scheme, which were temporary measures to be replaced by the housing assistance payment brought in by the previous Government. In Galway we were repeatedly told that it was the only game in town. It is a payment directly into the landlord's pocket and was considered to be adequate social housing. What happened was a rewriting of housing rights to say that a person is adequately housed in a private house. That is a fundamental part of the problem. The Minister should look at HAP and say that he is going to get rid of it. Obviously it cannot be got rid of overnight as people are utterly reliant on it, but as a policy it is unacceptable and it is bolstering the market. Spending on the payment has gone from €151 million up to €300 million last year and is expect to rise to €451 million for this year alone. This is spending on one scheme without looking at any of the other schemes. If we put them all together it comes to approximately €1 billion going directly into a private market and yet we wonder why rents are increasing all of the time. We then bring in these little pieces of a jigsaw to try to deal with the matter under pressure rather than asking what the real picture here is. The real picture is the duty on us to house our citizens and to provide a variety of housing right in each town and city and throughout the country so that there will be no crisis.

Galway city is twinned with Lorient. Councillors have gone over to Lorient on many occasions and have noted that in an area the same size as Galway, there is no housing crisis and no traffic crisis. I understand that in Vienna somewhere between 21% and 23% of housing is public housing. Why is the Minister not looking at these cities and learning from them rather than wasting time in the Dáil telling us that we are stuck on some ideological trip or are being deliberately negative, as opposed to saying that we are sensible people who have come here with a purpose and who have been elected to do a job? Our job is to say that there is a housing crisis. It is not inevitable. It has been created and it can be uncreated, so to speak, and changed to provide homes for our citizens. In the meantime, we are left supporting legislation like this and left reliant on Threshold, the Simon Community and the other bodies on the ground that are telling us there is a severe problem.

According to the Central Statistics Office, CSO, there were 497,111 occupations in the private rental sector in 2016. This is a significant increase on the figures from the 2011 census and yet we are not learning and are putting more and more people into rented accommodation. We end up demonising landlords, which is not appropriate. We need landlords and a competitive market, but we need the Government to be the primary landlord to balance the market.

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