John Lahart (Dublin South West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I am grateful for the opportunity the Ceann Comhairle has given me to contribute. I acknowledge the courtesy of the Minister, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, in alerting me to his inability to take this matter, for which he has a good reason.

I voted against the programme for Government last year. I stood alone on the issue of strategic housing developments, SHDs, having witnessed their impact on my constituency, including their lack of democratic input and transparency and the fact that they so easily ignore and override local area plans and county development plans. As the Ceann Comhairle well knows, county development plans are arrived at by democratic agreement following what is usually 99 weeks of extensive public consultation and engagement and are approved by locally elected public representatives who have, by the end of the 99 weeks, attained a solid sense of what their communities can bear, taking into account national imperatives around housing needs.

The recent furore around investment funds seemed to surprise people, yet the first such bulk buy that I witnessed was of the former Notre Dame convent site in south Dublin. Young couples had eagerly placed their names on the list for apartments to buy in the development only to be told when the apartments were completed that none of them was to go for sale on the open market and that all of them would be rented. That must be close to four years ago. I believe it was an Irish pension fund that invested in them.

Strategic housing developments are a tantalising prospect for investment funds. We now see that some of them are applying the same rules to residential developments as they have applied to commercial developments for many years, leaving vacant units lying idle rather than reducing their rents in order to maintain the capital value of those units over time and keeping local rents high to boot.

From 2019, I witnessed the torrent of young adults returning, quite literally in their droves, to their family homes. No matter how loving the welcome or how secure the tenure offered by their parents, being forced to return home to live with one's folks because one cannot afford rents is humiliating and embarrassing, strong emotions that, if left unresponded to, will surely manifest in individual and public anger eventually.

The journalist, Mr. Killian Woods, wrote extensively at the time of the introduction of SHDs about how developers had pulled the wool over the eyes of officials and the then Minister for Housing, Planning and Local Government, who were sold on the concept lock, stock and barrel because SHDs promised fast-track planning. However, half of the permissions granted in 2018 and 2019, never mind in later years, have not been acted on and no ground has been broken on them.

Disturbingly, it is not only apartment developments that are now subject to either SHDs or bulk buying in my constituency, but even housing estates are becoming build-to-rents at colossal rents. One such estate is White Pines on Stocking Avenue. Twenty SHDs are in the system for Tallaght, the most famous locally being the Cosgrave lands in Knocklyon, where almost 600 apartments will be built to rent close by mature residential estates housing the very same young adults who have been forced home to live because they cannot afford market rents. The worst example that I have heard of was of a 60-year-old woman who had returned to live with her 80-year-old mother because she could not afford a rental in Dublin.

Investment funds have a place in the modern building environment but they have begun to dominate it in my constituency.

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