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

People Before Profit will support this Bill. I want to cut to the chase. There have been many debates on renters and housing in this Chamber. Renters are being ripped off in the State. A small cohort of landlords are doing extremely well out of this. They are doing so well that they have commodified the basic human right to shelter. Does the Minister know how that has happened? It has happened because his Government and previous Governments have facilitated it.

Getting to the juicy details, billions of euro have been transferred to private landlords through housing subsidy payments. This year more than €1 billion will go to private landlords because of the absence of public housing. Vulture funds were allowed to buy up billions of euro worth of loans and NAMA sold off property portfolios at vastly reduced prices. The vulture fund, Lone Star, paid €500 in corporate tax in 2016 while in the same year it made €15 million in profits. Has the world gone mad? The bad policy was created by previous Governments.

The single biggest cause of homelessness is evictions from the private rental sector. Due to the lack of supply, rents have been inflated by the private sector. We have a generation that has witnessed the worst housing crisis in decades, not only in the rental market but in terms of the homelessness situation. Prior to the Covid-19 public health emergency, affordable houses were unaffordable and rents were almost unaffordable. In the past three months, rents in this State have risen by 0.5%. It is obvious that rent increases are Covid-resistant.

In Dublin Mid-West, landlords do not accept HAP but they accept homeless HAP which is 20% more than the market rate. For example, the rent for some houses is probably double what it was perhaps two years ago. Landlords are causing the crazy inflationary situation where people are being completely priced out of the market.

This has been created by the neo-liberal policies of the Minister’s Government. That will only be challenged and overturned when that policy is overturned. There are still almost 9,500 people in emergency accommodation in this State. It is an absolute shame that this is happening. Until that is challenged, we will continue to come back to this Chamber to raise the same situation.

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