Eoghan Murphy (Dublin Bay South, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

-----which has helped 10,000 people, individuals and couples, to get new homes? Would he replace the Rebuilding Ireland home loan, which has helped hundreds of people to buy their first home? Would he replace the rent pressure zones, which have meant that for the first time in two years, we have seen rents fall? Would he replace our social housing programme, under which one in every four newly built homes was a social housing home? It does not matter if it is Dublin City Council or the Iveagh Trust contracting a builder. Indeed, the latter has been providing social housing for longer than this State, let alone the city council. We are talking about social housing homes and every single one that is brought into our social housing stock helps a family or an individual out of emergency accommodation. Would Deputy Ó Broin replace the €2.4 billion that we are spending on housing this year? This is the highest amount that the State has ever spent in a single year on housing. Perhaps he would replace the 5,000 individuals and their children who were prevented from entering emergency accommodation last year or who exited from such accommodation. Would he replace the 27,000 new tenancies that were supported last year through taxpayer support under Rebuilding Ireland? Would he close all the sites that are currently open across the country, where homes are being built every day? The Deputy spoke about replacing Rebuilding Ireland or throwing it out but with what would he replace it?

Which of those elements would Deputy Ó Broin throw away? They are working to help tens of thousands of people. We know that the root cause of our crisis at the moment is supply, but it is increasing. Nothing the Deputy has said, however, would increase supply any quicker. Doubling the money will not increase the time it takes to get planning, to get procurement and to build a home. It would not do that and it is wrong to suggest that it would.

The Deputy is right to say that as we build these new homes - the Government has said this before - we have to ensure we are protecting people while the supply of new homes to rent or buy increases. It is good to put forward ideas to debate and interrogate but we must ask ourselves whether this measure that has been put before us would help. From my view of it, the answer is "No". I assure the Deputy that we have done a lot of work on this. Every time a new idea is suggested we look at it thoroughly to see if there is something extra we could be doing because as a Government, of course, we want to help. If some idea was going to help people out of emergency accommodation, then why would we not implement it? This Bill, however, would not do that.

We do not have large numbers of foreign investors operating in the Irish rental sector. Even if such investors could be targeted, this Bill targets less than 5% of the market or 1% of transactions in 2017. Regrettably, we have a report from the UN rapporteur, which I do not believe has yet been published, only in the form of a press release. We do not know what evidence it has been based on. Only 5% of the market is controlled or managed by foreign institutional investors. How can it be extrapolated out to the other 95% which are not even involved in that sector?

Some 86% of Ireland's landlords own just one or two properties. These are not evil, corporate organisations or the demons Deputy Ó Broin makes them out to be. These are real people, some of whom are accidental landlords due to what happened in the crash. Some of these people may have made a small investment in another property that could quite possibly still be indebted, as was pointed out, because of the negative equity people found themselves in as a result of the housing crash and the fact the housing sector had not been managed correctly before.

Deputy Ó Broin's Bill is unconstitutional because it is an unjust attack on a sub-group of people for a societal problem that is far more complex than simply someone selling property. There is a link but it is far more complex than that. The Deputy's comparison with the commercial sector is wrong. If a person has a lease in place, even in the residential sector, it cannot be breached with a notice to quit. Even if the Bill was constitutional and passed that barrier, that provision would not be retrospective. It would not help anybody renting today but it would drive landlords out.

The Deputy has recognised that we are losing landlords from the sector. We must all recognise that losing landlords increases the numbers of people presenting to emergency accommodation. One of the unintended consequences, not through in the Bill, however, is that it could make housing insecurity worse for people because the landlords would see further restrictions on their own rights and further challenges to them exercising their own rights, thus driving those landlords out of the market. Consider a situation where a landlord needed to sell a property, for example, because he or she had gotten into financial difficulties, or because family member had medical bills. Let us say the Bill's provisions were legal and retrospective, there could be a decrease in the value of the property of between 20% and 30%. We have evidence of this.

What if the landlord's property is in negative equity and he or she is trying to sell the property to pay off a debt? What then? What if the landlord is trying to sell the property to meet the needs of a relative who is in distress? In not being able to realise the market value of a property, which had already been massively devalued over the years, these landlords could struggle to pay their own rent or mortgages and could themselves be at risk of entering emergency accommodation.

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