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

I will be sharing my time. I will take seven minutes and Deputy Barry will take three. I thank Deputy Ó Broin for using his party's Private Members' time to bring up this important discussion on affordable housing. It is very difficult to know where to start with the Government's narrative. It comes in here and says that the Opposition just criticises for the sake of criticising and that we have no constructive proposals. That is such a dishonest narrative. I am really quite sick of it at this stage. The Government continues to play politics with this issue, which is a crisis for great numbers of people. The majority of people are now affected by the crises in housing and affordability or by the extortionate cost of rent in one way or another. The vast majority of working people cannot afford the prices at which the market is delivering, or not delivering, houses or the rents being charged. They are simply unaffordable for the vast majority of people.

Rather than acknowledging the mess it has made of this, the Government keeps firing back dishonest criticism at the Opposition. Every single year since I got into the Dáil, People Before Profit has submitted an alternative budget. Since year one, 2011, we have been warning about the Government's policies on housing, and particularly its decision to sell off all the NAMA properties. We had the opportunity to take control of this land bank and to deal with the housing crisis by delivering affordable housing on a massive scale. In 2011, we warned that the Government was making a disastrous decision.

In that year, the same Fine Gael-Labour Party Government made a decision, one that was also criticised by us, to stop the capital construction programme of public housing and outsource the delivery of social housing to the private sector. In what was essentially a counter-revolution in social housing, social housing was transformed overnight into social housing support, which was code for outsourcing it to the private sector. These two decisions - offloading the NAMA portfolio and stopping the building of council housing - have led to this disastrous situation. It is not just a disaster for the 70,000 to 100,000 families on social housing waiting lists. If the State is not delivering public and affordable housing on its own land, it means that the for-profit entities - vulture funds, cuckoos and speculators - control the market, prices and rents, destroying things for everyone. The public land bank is the way to dampen the market and have a counterbalance to these unaffordable rents and property prices.

I should add to this debate the banks, which have not been mentioned yet. In 2019, the Central Bank pointed out that people in Ireland were paying €80,000 more in interest on an average mortgage of €300,000 than their European counterparts were. This is another component of the unaffordability issue. The banks that we bailed out are essentially extorting their mortgage customers with the highest interest rates anywhere in Europe.

How do we solve this crisis? We should do the exact opposite of what the Government is doing. People Before Profit has been saying this in budget submission after budget submission since I entered the Dáil in 2011. We should use the public land bank to deliver public and affordable housing directly. Affordability must not have anything to do with the market. The whole point of affordability is that it should be related to someone's income. If it is related to market conditions or market prices, it is not about affordability, but something else. If we want to unravel the mystery of why the Government, despite making announcement after announcement about affordable housing for five years or God knows how long, has not delivered a single affordable house, there is a simple reason. The same property developers the Government is talking to and being lobbied by - we have now discovered that the Government is giving them hundreds of millions of euro and designing laws in order to involve them further in public land banks through the Land Development Agency - do not want houses being sold at affordable levels. If they were trying to flog houses at €400,000 or €500,000 but the State was building €180,000 or €200,000 houses, who would buy houses from them? The Government should not care about them. It should care about delivering housing. This can be done on public land at rates that are affordable. It would drive the speculators, vulture funds, cuckoos and so on crazy, however, which is why the Government does not do it and we either do not get affordable housing or get "affordable" housing that is unaffordable. The cap in Dublin will be €450,000. The Minister called it a local area ceiling price cap, but that would defeat the whole point of affordability if the cap is based on market conditions in Dublin, which are off the Richter scale. The cap must be about income. A teacher, nurse, council worker or retail worker does not earn a higher wage just because he or she happens to live in Dublin where rents and property prices are higher. Affordability has to be linked to the actual incomes that ordinary workers earn, and the average income in this country is approximately €40,000 per year, with many earning much less. Rents and mortgages have to be set at actual affordable levels. This means rent controls where local authorities tell landlords that they are not allowed to charge more than a certain amount for a property. The rent would have to be affordable for the incomes of ordinary workers.

We have proposed solutions. They could be used, but the truth is that the Government is not interested because it is dancing to the tune of the speculators, vultures and investment funds that want to profit from the housing crisis and have no interest in solving it.

See this speech in context