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

I thank Sinn Féin for using its Private Members' time to raise this important issue.

The Government has learned absolutely nothing from the disastrous mistakes that have led to the current housing crisis. The two mistakes were the disastrous decision to invite in the vulture funds, cuckoo funds and speculators, particularly in 2013 and 2014, and the simultaneous and equally disastrous decision by the Fine Gael-Labour Party Government to essentially stop the building of public housing directly by local authorities. Fianna Fáil started those mistakes when it set up NAMA and increasingly outsourced and cut back the provision of social housing. However, Fine Gael and the Labour Party turned a bad situation into a disaster in 2013-14 with the two decisions to stop building council housing and to bring in the vulture funds with tax incentives, etc. Those are the reasons.

First, NAMA handed over more than €40 billion worth of land and property assets to these vultures, giving them significant control over the market. It gets worse, however, because these funds are now buying up new builds. We are now being told that despite the disastrous situation these vultures have created, we cannot do without them.

You only need to google the profits of some of these entities - anybody can do it - to see what enormous fortunes they have made. The worse the housing crisis is, the more valuable their assets are, the more profits they make, the more rents they can charge, and the higher the prices of the properties they sell. It is a simple equation. While they control the market, they have no interest in solving the housing crisis. This is the simple truth the Government does not understand.

Now the Government wants to compound this disastrous situation by not only allowing these funds to have control of the private housing sector but to open up the public land bank to them with the Land Development Agency Bill that will go through next week. I cannot ring the alarm bells enough for the public out there about what the Land Development Agency, LDA, is. This is letting the fox into the hen house to plunder all of the public land bank. The one thing that could dampen the market and counteract the influence of these people is for the State, on a large scale, to build its own stock of public and genuinely affordable housing.

I see the Minister, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, nod and then I look at the figures for 2020. Last year, 269 council houses were built in the four local authority areas in Dublin where the crisis is most acute. The figures in Galway, Cork and so on are similarly pathetic.

In Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown the number is zero. Zero council houses were built. A few were provided by AHBs and most of the rest were provided through HAP or the rental accommodation scheme, RAS, that is, outsourced to these funds that are making a fortune. The result is situations like that faced by residents in St. Helen's Court in Dún Laoghaire, which has been going on for four years. The property was sold by NAMA to Apollo Global Management, represented by PwC. It was flipped on to Mill Street Projects Limited, which has made four attempts to evict the tenants. Some tenants have been driven out while others - ordinary working people - are accused of over-holding and are facing homelessness. The owners want to drive up the value of the property but what has the Government done to stop this? It has done nothing.

What we need is to start building public and affordable housing on public land. We also need punitive taxes on vacant properties and vacant sites and rent controls. We need to stop the tax breaks for these vultures and to completely exclude them from the housing market. Were we to do those things, we could start to solve the housing disaster the Government's policies has created.

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