Réada Cronin (Kildare North, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to speak on this Private Members' Bill from the Social Democrats. I commend Deputy Cian O'Callaghan on his timely debate to repeal Part V leasing.

It needs to go because when it comes to housing our people, a 25-year lease is about as prudent as taking truckloads of public cash and setting fire to them on a public green. With so many houses being snapped up by long-term leasing, it looks like public money will be piled high and set ablaze, like in Mullen Park in Maynooth in my constituency in north Kildare. What will be at the end of these bonfires? There will be piles of public ash but no public assets.

Leasing is not about public housing and its good and proper place in society. It is not about looking after families and individuals, giving them a chance to build a life and a future in a community in a forever home. It is a shallow political fix for a deep societal problem caused by too much Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, along with their co-dependents, the market hawks, vultures, cuckoos and developers. It is a shallow political fix with deep financial and social consequences. A house is no longer home. It is a commodity. When people cannot afford to buy, they face mutant markets. Their hard work, salaries, savings and mortgages are useless against the war chest of London and New York. My hard-working constituents in north Kildare saw this in Mullen Park in Maynooth.

Public housing is seen as easy spending with the transfer of public cash to private investors. We see housing, especially public housing, as being about the public good and about investment in our people. As it stands today, the public pays the lease for the term, be it 20 years or 25 years. The public also pays for the refurb at the end of this lease, yet the same public, in the form of the local council, walks away from this transaction with nothing to show for it. It is a case of one arm as long as the other. There is nothing to show for hundreds of millions of euro of citizens' hard-earned cash with no houses or assets.

When it comes to public housing, leasing is not just the developers' cash cow. It is the entire financial herd. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael expect the public to put up the hard cash to cover the risk for these financiers. The State is basically allowing these global investors take no risk whatsoever. The Government cannot treat the public as cash cows for global financiers. It cannot serve two masters. Do Ministers have any idea how frustrating it is for the public to hear them saying that this is unacceptable when they created the problem? They were warned about the problem but continued to accept it. It is absolutely disgraceful.

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