Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Yesterday evening, I received a message from a struggling first-time buyer. She asked me to read her message into the Dáil record today. It states:

Dear TDs, those who have a controlling hand over our future.

I am a 27 year old woman living with my parents.

I am lucky enough to have a high paying job.

However, I am a single woman, with friends who are in relationships and in settled living situations.

[When the Tuesday evening news broke], my first thought was 'Great. I will be living with my parents until I am either not single or else am 35.'

We should not be forced into relationships to afford to live out of our parents’ houses.

There is going to be a mass exodus from Ireland of those of us in our 20s, simply because we cannot afford to live ... [here].

When the choices are to live with parents until we can afford a shed in someone's back garden or to rent and starve, there is a serious problem.

I ask for a show of hands in the Dáil of who owns ... [their own home].

Imagine moving your entire family in with your parents, and not being allowed to move out again.

I promise, you would very quickly understand the extreme decline in people's mental health in the past decade.

[...]

You all have a responsibility to your people. Put caps on house prices. Set a price for a house of a certain size.

A pitiful 10% stamp duty is simply not good enough. Stop the vulture funds. Help your people.

The experience of this young woman, whose anger and frustration can be noted in her words, is the experience of tens of thousands of others, including singles and couples alike, first-time buyers, those who are separated and divorced who are seeking another home, those who lost their homes through no fault of their own owing to mortgage distress after the Celtic tiger, and, indeed, those trapped in negative equity who need to trade up but cannot. Over recent weeks, both the Minister for Finance and his colleague, the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage, promised that they would help them and stop the bulk buying of family homes, houses, duplexes and apartments that were intended at the outset to be purchased by working people. Instead, both in the financial resolution before us and the proposed planning reforms of the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage, the Government has offered them absolutely nothing. The pretence of action will do nothing to solve the problem.

8 o’clock

Funds will continue to bulk buy family homes. Worse still, the exclusion of apartments means that if one wants to live in a city centre, high-cost rental will be the only option. This decision undermines the national planning framework, the climate action plan and the possibility of ever having a 15-minute city. It will have long-term consequences undermining the sustainable development of our city centres for years to come. In the suburbs, if you are single, a couple without children or a separated or divorced person, your future will also only be high-cost rental. Just as it has been for the past five years, so it will be for the remainder of this Government. There will be minimal investment in genuinely affordable homes for working people to rent or buy and the red carpet for big developers and institutional investors.

I wonder if the Minister understands how angry people are at the Government. Is the Government so out of touch with its own voters that it cannot see the damage it is doing to them, to our cities and to our housing system? Ineffective tax changes and ill-conceived knee-jerk changes to our planning system are not the solution. People need affordable homes to rent and to buy, not in their tens or hundreds but in their thousands. Last night, Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Green Party made it crystal clear that will happen only with a change of Government to one led by a party that is genuinely committed to delivering the thousands of affordable homes to rent and buy that working people desperately need and rightly deserve.

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