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

I thank the Deputies. In reply to Deputy Wallace, the housing sector in this country was dysfunctional for decades and it broke completely following the financial crisis. What we are trying to do now is rebuild it in a way that is sustainable so it will not crash again. There is a levy on vacant land and that is what we discussed in the previous question. In regard to our ambitions around social housing, one in four of every new homes built last year was built for social housing. That is an ambition that no previous Government has had and we are going to continue that into the years ahead under the national development plan.

I am sorry I did not come back to Deputy Ó Broin's question but Deputy Wallace brought us into other areas. In regard to this particular area, the ownership of a property does not abrogate a tenant's rights in regard to the rent controls we put in place or a lease agreement they may have. We have brought in much stronger tenancy protections in recent years and we are only going to strengthen them in the coming weeks. Of course, this is something we keep under review in terms of making sure that, as we transform the Residential Tenancies Board, RTB, and make it a proper independent regulator of our rental sector, it can have a proper view of exactly what is happening in market. That is why the annual registration of individual tenants is so important to allow them to build up a proper knowledge base of exactly what is happening on a real-time basis, year in, year out, in our rental sector. Of course, we keep it under review and I have discussed this report with the Minister for Finance, Deputy Donohoe, which was one of the Deputy's earlier questions.

In response to Deputy Jan O'Sullivan, the view of the Department, which prepared the report, was that it would not necessarily be the case that had an institutional investor not come in and bought, say, 50 apartments in a single scheme, this would mean that 50 people who were going to be first-time buyers might have bought them instead. The likelihood, on its analysis, is that they might have been bought by individual buy-to-let investors, which would perhaps further reinforce the instability we have seen from having such a large share of individual landlords control such a large part of the property sector for rent in this country.

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