Gino Kenny (Dublin Mid West, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

People Before Profit will be supporting this Bill. The Minister of State, Deputy English, will agree that the rent spiral is out of control, and when something is out of control, it needs to be stopped. We are at 20% more than peak rents in 2008. We all know what happened in 2008. Even by comparison with 2011 when it was trough rents, rents are 40% more now. Rents are completely unsustainable at present.

I had a look on daft.ieat three houses in Clondalkin and the statistics are incredible. At present, a three-bedroom house in Clondalkin is €2,400 a month, a two-bedroom unit is €1,500, and a one-bedroom unit is €1,400. These are extraordinary figures. Doing the maths, two people on the average industrial wage would have to forgo half their income on rent alone, which is incredibly expensive and almost completely unsustainable. The recommended spend on rent or mortgage is one third of income. A person on or just above the minimum wage can forget about rent in Clondalkin or anywhere else.

I want to mention the housing assistance payment, HAP. Not only are landlords discriminating against tenants on HAP, they are looking for homeless HAP. They drive up rents so much that they get more than €2,000 because people are desperate and the Government is giving this money out to landlords.

A report earlier this year showed that one in ten people in Ireland is spending over 60% of his or her income on rent. This is completely unsustainable. All this is having a corrosive effect on society. Not only are three generations living in houses but also 10,000 find themselves in homeless accommodation because of the perfect storm of the policy of no public housing and rents going through the roof.

I agree with the Minister that not all landlords are bad. There are some accidental landlords who, for certain regions, have a house to rent etc. There are some decent people out there. However, the over-reliance on the private market, super landlords and other landlords has distorted everything and has created a situation where it is completely unsustainable.

Government policy, regardless of whether the Minister of State, Deputy English, likes it, because he has been in government for the past nine years, has created this crisis. The Government has created a crisis where rents are completely unsustainable. There are three ways that will be tackled: a rent freeze, rent control, and the Government being shown the door.

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