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

The Tánaiste is acting as if the rampage and plunder by cuckoo and vulture funds and investment vehicles - terms are too polite; they should all just be called bloodsuckers - is some sort of isolated incident or inadvertent mistake that the Government is going to rectify. Why does he not admit the truth? When the Tánaiste was Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport in the Fine Gael and Labour Party Government, the former Minister, Michael Noonan and his officials from the Department of Finance had 65 meetings in 2013 and 2014 with vulture funds where they invited them in to commence the rampage.

In a deliberate policy, the National Asset Management Agency, NAMA, was told to sell off, which it subsequently did, more than €40 billion worth of land and property assets to these bloodsuckers. They have now moved on to buying up new estates as well. The consequence of that is they are almost entirely pricing ordinary working people out of the market to buy their own homes. We have an extraordinary situation that beggars belief. It is so bad that the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage is describing affordable housing as costing €400,000 or €450,000 when one would need an income in excess of €90,000 or €100,000 to be able to afford the affordable houses, never mind the houses that these people are providing at full market price. We have tents littering the city as a result. We have extortionate rents being charged by these same entities in my area of no less than €2,000 per month and up to €3,000 and €3,500 per month. This is a result of a direct and deliberate - and indeed "ideological" to use the Tánaiste's favourite word - policy of Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil to facilitate, incentivise and encourage these bloodsuckers.

I want to ask the Tánaiste about the next chapter of all of this, which is the Land Development Agency Bill. It is bad enough that this Government and past Governments have let these people rampage and plunder the private housing sector, whether it was for purchase or rental properties. However, with the Land Development Agency, the Government will allow them to rampage and plunder through the entire public land bank. It will invite them in to do the same thing to the public land bank that they have done in the private housing market. The one thing that could help us address this crisis and deliver public and affordable housing to rent and purchase is by doing it ourselves on our land bank. Far from doing that, the Government will invite those entities in to plunder that land bank with the Land Development Agency Bill. I beg the Tánaiste to stop the madness and to start next week by abandoning the Government's plans with the Land Development Agency.

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