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

When it comes to the housing crisis, I am afraid the Taoiseach is living in a parallel universe. Every single day, evidence of the disastrous consequences of Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil policies piles up. In the past few weeks, there has been evidence about cuckoo funds pricing ordinary working people out of being able to buy homes. Yesterday, evidence emerged of rents rising across the country by 7% and starting to rise again in Dublin. Today, there is report about house prices rising 3.7% last year and increasing by an incredible 90% since 2012. Walk outside the gates of Leinster House and there are tents with homeless people absolutely littering the streets. In my area, residents of St. Helen's Court are victims of a vulture fund that is now trying to evict them even though they have done nothing wrong.

All the Government suggests is that maybe we will impose a little stamp duty on purchases by these profit-hungry entities or slightly limit the percentage of these cuckoo funds that are wrecking the market and pricing ordinary working people out of it in the context of rents and house prices. If we were dealing with the Bill put forward by the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, these entities would still be able to buy 70% of estates. The truth is what the Government needs to do is exclude the cuckoo and vulture funds that former Michael Noonan and Deputy Howlin invited into the country in 2012, 2013 and 2014. They need to be excluded from the market altogether, as is the case in New Zealand. We need rent controls, not pressure zones or 4% increases every year, in order to make rents affordable. We need punitive taxes on any land or property hoarding or hoarding of vacant properties by speculators and investment funds.

It is absolutely critical that we use the public land bank at scale to build public and genuinely affordable housing. The proof the Government is not doing that is the Land Development Agency, LDA, Bill going through the Dáil. What that Bill will do is open up the public land bank to the same investment vehicles that have wrecked the private housing sector and priced a whole generation of young people and working people out of the housing market or made them prey to the extortionate rents charged by these vulture funds. That is what the Government is doing. The proof that the Government's commitments to change the policy are nonsense is the fact that the LDA Bill is a plan for a heist by the very investment vehicles that have profiteered at the expense of all the people who are in the grip of the housing crisis we face.

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