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

If we had a little bit longer for the small groups, we might have time.

A modern day plague or infestation has struck most of Dublin and perhaps other parts of the country. The infestation is particularly acute in south Dublin. It is not locusts but property developers and property speculators, who are drawn like bees around a honey pot or perhaps flies around a less pleasant substance, but the attraction point is strategic housing developments, SHDs. They are really just a mechanism to print money for speculators and property developers, facilitated by Government policy. The extent of the infestation is extraordinary.

Deputy Bríd Smith referred earlier to the Player Wills, Bailey Gibson and St. Teresa's Gardens sites, where there is talk of 19 storeys, mostly for developments of one-bed or two-bed units of build-to-rent units with rents of between €1,350 and €2,800. They are completely inappropriate, unaffordable and driven by profit. There is nothing strategic at all about it. In my area, on the Dalguise House site in Monkstown it is proposed to build 300 units up to nine storeys, in Abingdon in Shankill it is proposed to build 193 units up to eight storeys and a proposed development on the car park of St. Michael's Hospital in Dún Laoghaire is for 13 storeys. All those sites are build-to-rent developments. In Deansgrange there is a proposed development of 151 units over six storeys; on the Europa site, it is 101 units over nine storeys; and on the site in Eblana Avenue, it is proposed to build 208 co-living units over six storeys. The Charleville site in Dalkey is for 105 apartments over six storeys and there is also the Cluain Mhuire site. One can go through the list. These are all SHDs and, as we know, at a national level will provide 43,000 homes. They are mostly one-bed and two-bed apartments and permission has been given through the mechanism by which these speculators, frankly parasites, operate. How many units have been delivered? A total of 700. When they are delivered the rents are shocking, as is the cost of building them, as the quantity surveyors pointed out to us. This is what is actually going on. SHDs are just a means to print money for property developers and they are totally unaffordable for ordinary families, with shockingly high rents. Will the Minister get rid of the SHD process and instead start to build affordable housing on public land?

The truth is that it is one or the other.

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