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

The abysmal failure of the Government's housing policy is well known and acknowledged at this stage. There are 100,000 households on the housing lists, some waiting a decade or more. There are extortionate rents in Dublin running at an average of €1,600 per month, which means someone would need to be able to spend more than €18,000 a year on rent to afford that. House prices are completely unaffordable, costing an average of €383,000 in Dublin. One would need to have saved €40,000 and have a salary of €100,000 or more to afford that. In my area, average house prices are €570,000 which does not even bear thinking about. One in five of our population is paying 40% or more of income on housing, one in ten is paying 60% or more and one in 20 is paying an incredible 75% of income on housing.

These failures are well known but the Government often asks if we have any solutions. I want to propose a few solutions that presented themselves from developments this week. As we speak, the city government in Berlin has proposed a five-year rent freeze because rents have gone through the roof and become unaffordable. The Government says this is not practical but it is being done in Berlin. Could we not do what is being done Berlin and freeze rents? This is the major reason people are being driven into homelessness and emergency housing. As they are also planning to do in Berlin, could we regulate vulture and cuckoo funds which are wrecking the housing sector and driving prices and rents through the roof? More than 11% of housing sold in 2018 was bought by vulture and cuckoo funds, worsening the housing crisis as they profiteer from it.

There are more than 200,000 empty houses in Ireland.

There are 360 vacant sites which could be built on. The Economic and Social Research Institute has stated loopholes mean there should be a hell of a lot more sites on the register. It is asking for something we have demanded for a long time, namely, an aggressive vacant site and property tax that would force such sites and homes into use for people who desperately need them.

I turn finally to affordable housing. This week, I attended a meeting of the Joint Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government. The National Development Finance Agency and the Housing Agency pointed out that, effectively, there is no affordable housing scheme. They noted that it is being done on a site-by-site basis and they simply cannot come up with formulations to make it affordable. In one of the few pilots that was promised to be delivered three years ago in Enniskerry, not a single house has been built but there is talk of rents of €1,200 a month. The two bodies acknowledged that it is not affordable. Could we not have an affordable scheme based simply on the principle that only one third of one's income would be required to pay rent, with rents set on that basis? I have presented a few practical proposals to which I would like the Tánaiste to respond.

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