Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The provision of affordable housing is a fundamental duty of the State. I commend Deputy Ó Broin on all the work he has done in putting this front and centre. There is no doubt that this and previous Governments have abjectly failed in their duty to provide affordable housing. Housing has become unaffordable and the majority of workers and families are locked out. Since February 2012 house prices have doubled in Dublin. The same story is told right across the State. Since 2016, house prices have jumped by 30%, while rents have increased by 44%. In my constituency of Donegal, rents have increased by 7% in the past year alone.

Faced with this failure, the Government has been desperate to blame everybody but itself. However, it is Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael who between them have held power in the State for the past decade. Their record speaks for itself. In 2016, Fine Gael's Rebuilding Ireland housing plan promised much. It promised to deliver 2,000 affordable rental homes by 2018. The total number delivered to date amounts to zero. In 2018, the previous Government, led by Fine Gael, promised to deliver 6,000 affordable purchase homes by 2021. The total number that have been delivered to date is also zero. There has been a failure to deliver.

The housing crisis goes well beyond the issue of affordability, with the legacy of defective housing impacting countless homeowners and renters. In Donegal, thousands of homeowners are affected by mica, with their homes seriously damaged. The redress scheme requires homeowners to stump up 10% of the cost of remediation but, in reality it is far more than 10%, in some cases it is 30% and above. This has resulted in the scheme being unattainable for many families and, in short, no use to them whatsoever. Sinn Féin argued from the beginning that we need a 100% redress scheme, similar to the pyrite remediation scheme that was rolled out in Dublin and north Leinster.

Many generations now look to the future with anxiety and despair at their ability to start a family and to secure a home. Events in recent weeks have shown that the unaffordability and scarcity of housing has been compounded by the Government's own policy towards investment funds in the housing market. The block purchase of homes by an investment fund at a new development in Maynooth rightly angered the nation, as the public now know it was not an isolated incident, nor was it an accident but something that has been happening for years as a direct result of Government policy. In Dublin alone, six out of every ten new homes were snapped up by these funds in 2019, pushing struggling homeowners out of the market, driving up rent and driving up house prices. This is by design. In doing so, these funds have been facilitated by the Government through tax breaks, advantages and exemptions that leave them with a significant advantage over struggling home buyers. They also have the advantage that the State invests directly in these vulture funds. In addition, they have the benefit of paying no corporation tax on their rental profits, no capital gains tax and little by way of stamp duty.

Sinn Féin has called for years for these tax advantages to be brought to an end. Now that the Government has been caught out it is scrambling to give the appearance of action as the spotlight shines on a crisis of its own making. We will closely scrutinise the proposals the Government brings forward. Let me be clear: for the Government to in any way exclude apartments from any measures it introduces is for it to tell struggling home buyers that an apartment is not a home, and it is. It would also be telling struggling home buyers that they are not welcome in cities. These funds pay no tax on their rental profits and no tax on capital gains. Sinn Féin has called for a stamp duty surcharge. For it to have any impact it needs to be applied without exception at a rate of at least 17%, but it needs to go beyond that. We must ensure that the profits of these funds are taxed. Anything short of that simply will not cut it.

The motion before us is about making housing affordable again. It calls for doubling of direct capital investment in public housing. It also calls for annual targets to deliver cost rental and affordable purchase homes, and for every local authority in the State to deliver a minimum of 8,000 affordable units each year. Unaffordable and scarce housing is a social crisis. It really requires a change of Government to deal with it, but short of that I urge all Deputies to support this motion and start to turn the tide on this crisis.

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