Patricia Ryan (Kildare South, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

There should be alarm bells ringing about the shared equity scheme and the effect it will have on house prices and debt levels for borrowers. Senior civil servants in the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform, the ESRI and the Central Bank have all expressed concern at this scheme. The Minister is ignoring the advice and carrying on regardless. This is reckless and bears all the hallmarks of how Fianna Fáil did business when last in government. The Celtic tiger has taught us that if mortgage credit is increased, it increases house prices. When Fianna Fáil was last in government it very regularly ignored the advice of experts and regulators, which it is still doing today with NPHET and the response to Covid, by the way.

The €75 million the Government proposes for the shared equity scheme would be more productively spent on the delivery by local authorities and approved housing bodies of affordable homes to rent and buy than on feathering the nests of developers and vulture funds. There has been too much pandering to lobby groups and vested interests. It is about time we had a Government that stood up for ordinary working people and their families. Sinn Féin's proposal would see homes built on public land and rented or sold at cost. It looks to me like the construction industry is writing the Government housing policy. This needs to change. Last year a lobby group called Irish Institutional Property, IIP, published a proposal for a shared equity scheme aimed at bridging the housing affordability gap. IIP is the self-confessed voice of institutionally financed investors, with significant international backing, in the Irish real estate market. Its members manage close to €14 billion worth of Irish property. The CEO of this group is a former secretary general of Fianna Fáil and former chief executive of the Irish Banking Federation. The current CEO of the Banking and Payments Federation Ireland is a former Fine Gael Minister of State at the Department of Finance and former MEP. The cosy relationship that saw Deputies mix with former RTÉ presenters, developers and unnamed guests of the CEO of the Banking and Payments Federation Ireland at the infamous Clifden golf dinner needs to end now. There must be no more of the cosy cartels we have tolerated for far too long.

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