Michael Fitzmaurice (Roscommon-Galway, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Acting Chairman. I was talking to a person the other day, and as some of the so-called experts will say, one might be better renting. I saw a debate on the television a year ago where a person had paid €250,000 in rent and had nothing for it and still had to buy a house now. It just shows.

I thank the Labour Party for bringing this motion forward. To the Minister, this is about supply and demand. If there is a tight supply of houses, landlords have a field day. At the end of the day, the Minister needs to address one thing. Some €100 million has been taken off the budget of Irish Water. It's fixing of leaks is stopping now because the money is gone halfway through the year. If the Government does not put in the sewers and water in the next year or two, it will not have houses. At the moment, it will get a lovely letter back from Irish Water saying it will give it to consultants, who will come back in a year, and in two or three years’ time Irish Water might do it. That is not how a housing problem is fixed or the people who need houses now are sorted.

On the fair deal nursing homes scheme, as has been pointed out earlier, there are several houses in towns, small or large, and in cities throughout the country that are left idle because people have gone into nursing homes. We need to bring incentives in there. A Bill was to be brought forward - I am aware that the Minister of State is here - and it seems to have vanished into thin air.

On evictions, we have seen different Bills brought in over recent years to deal with this issue. The reality at the moment is that Promontoria will take a person wherever it wants and do whatever it wants. The large vulture funds do not have any mercy for the people in this country. Until we bring in proper legislation to ensure protection where someone is making an effort, we are not going to solve this problem.

On renting, there are couples throughout this country whom we need to do things for, such as incentives we can provide for them and ways we can make sure. For example, why do we not use the English system where if a person travels to X, Y, or Z for a year, we will put him or her higher up on the list. There is an opportunity, especially in rural Ireland, be it in small towns or in the rural areas, where there are a lot of houses where, if €20,000 or €30,000 was spent on them, that was given to the people who own them, and a proportion of it was taken off the rent as each year went by, say over five or six years, we would have a double win. We would have someone living in a community and we would have a family housed that might not have a house. We would also give them the opportunity, when suitable accommodation would come up wherever they would want to go back to, of putting them up on the list.

We have to start thinking outside the box rather than the same ding dong, the same Department stuff, the same civil servants doing the same thing day in, day out, and we get the same answer. If we keep pressing the same tune, we are going to hear the same song. Unless we think outside the box in this new Dáil, we are going to be here in the same place in five years’ time. In the previous Dáil we must have had about 20 different debates on this issue, but where did it get us? It got us to the same old song that we are listening to over and over again. We have to rock the boat and say to the people that are doing this work down through the years, be it Secretaries General, principal officers or whoever, that this is not working, that we have to look at things in a different way, that we are not going to be nodding to them for this five years, and that we are going to take it on and change it. If we do not do that, we are wasting our time being here at all. I want to let Deputy Harkin speak now.

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