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

I thank the Acting Chairman. Sinn Féin is proud to support fully this legislation to give effect to the 1973 Report of the Committee on the Price of Building Land, the Kenny report. The leader of the Labour Party, Deputy Kelly, rightly reminded us that on three occasions his party has introduced similar legislation. What he forgot to say, of course, is that during that same period of time his party has participated in six separate Governments since the Kenny report was published in 1973. While I am very grateful to him to give us this opportunity to support this legislation today, many of us can agree that it would have been better if the Labour Party had sought to introduce this legislation when in government rather than just from the Opposition benches.

The Labour Party spokespeople are completely right that at the core of our housing crisis over the last 30 years has been a refusal of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael to accept that when the private sector is left to its own devices not only can it not solve our social and affordable housing crisis but, as we have seen in recent years, it will make it worse. Again, it has to be emphasised that on many occasions the Labour Party, as a junior partner in coalition, has facilitated those bad policies, notwithstanding its opposition to those policies from the previous Opposition budgets.

If one looks at the last time the Labour Party was in government, it is a testament to that failure. When last in government from 2011, the Labour Party contributed to the cutting of social housing budgets, resulting in social housing output crashing to its lowest level in decades in 2014. In that same year the Labour Party Minister of State with responsibility for housing, former Deputy Jan O’Sullivan, steered the housing assistance payment legislation through the Oireachtas which was a particularly retrograde change and not a short-term support for people while they were rightly waiting for social housing. This was a long-term social housing support which has resulted in very many families waiting even longer for their forever home.

The author of this Bill, Deputy Kelly, was the Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government and his Social Housing Strategy 2020 is very difficult to distinguish from its successor: Rebuilding Ireland, with a low level of investment in the direct delivery of social housing and a dramatic over-reliance on the private sector and, in particular, on the private rental sector, to meet social housing need. This was a promise of cost rental that was never fulfilled during, in fairness to him, the then Minister’s short-term in office. The introduction of long-term leasing and other current expenditure delivery mechanisms which we have seen in more recent years have proved to be very costly to the taxpayer.

In fact I remember a very high profile spat between the then Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government, Deputy Kelly, and veteran homeless campaigner, Peter McVerry, who described the then Labour Party Minister’s housing policies as Alice in Wonderlandstuff.

Unfortunately, and it gives me no pleasure to say this, what happened in the years after those policies were introduced made the housing crisis worse. Not all of that was the fault of Deputy Kelly. He argued strongly for an increase in rent supplement but unfortunately his party colleague, the then Minister for Social Protection, former Deputy Joan Burton, blocked that. He also is argued strongly for rent certainty by linking rents to the consumer price index, which was something that Sinn Féin also supported then. Former Fine Gael Deputy Michael Noonan actively blocked that. As a consequence rents spiralled out of control from 2014 to 2015 onwards which directly led to the accelerated homeless crisis since then. Fine Gael must bear the full and primary responsibility for that crisis, but it would be disingenuous for anybody in the Labour Party to say that their failure to convince their coalition partners to do the right thing absolves them of responsibility for the spiralling cost of rents and the homeless crisis that followed.

Having said all of that, I will work with anybody from any party who wants to do the right thing on housing and that is why Sinn Féin is more than happy to support this Bill. Land values, especially in our city centre, are now spiralling out of control. In some developments the unit price of land can be as much as €100,000, adding 25% to the cost of purchasing or indeed renting that home. This has been driven up by sweetheart tax deals for institutional investors. There is no tax on the rent roll or on capital gains and there are huge volumes of cheap money flooding into our housing system and pricing out working families, whether young or those who have left their homes due to mortgage repossessions or relationship break-downs and are looking to rent or buy at a later stage in life.

The consequence of all of that is that the only thing that is being built in Dublin city at the moment is high-end, expensive, build-to-rent. That is not conducive to the kind of sustainable urban development policies that the Government is meant to be espousing and that the Green Party argued so eloquently for during the election campaign. As a further consequence of that Sinn Féin and anybody with a wit of sense in how to deal with this housing crisis will support any measure that would dampen land prices.

I would go further in saying that this good piece of legislation needs to be supplemented by other measures. We desperately need a reform of the vacant site levy. It was too low initially and local authorities do not have the ability or the resources to collect it adequately. There is a strong argument not only for it to be increased but for it to be transferred to Revenue on a self-declaration basis to ensure that tax does what it is intended to do.

We also urgently need to introduce use-it-or-lose-it zonings in planning permissions. Having been given the uplift in the value of the land by a zoning or a grant of permission, a landowner developer should not be allowed to sit on that property indefinitely and not develop it out. Unfortunately, not only is the Government not considering that but it is bringing forward legislation to the Seanad this week to extend planning permissions even further when there is no argument from a particular developer that necessitates such an extension.

At the core of any radical change in housing policy has to be a dramatic increase in direct State investment in the delivery of social, affordable rental and affordable purchase homes. The Economic and Social Research Institute, ESRI, has confirmed what Sinn Féin has been saying for many years which is to double that investment to at least €2.8 billion annually, if not by more, to deliver those 20,000 public homes in social, affordable-cost-rental and affordable-purchase that are required.

I fully agree with Deputies Sherlock and Ó Ríordáin in respect of the Minister of State’s remarks. It is telling that not a single member of Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael, as far as I can see, is in the Chamber. They are leaving it to the mudguard in coalition, the Green Party, to defend the completely indefensible. The idea, for example, that a Law Reform Commission report is a reason to delay is laughable given how often Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael-led Governments ignore those reports and leave them sitting on the shelf. The fact that the Government has other, similar proposals, somehow means that another good proposal cannot be progressed is, again, disingenuous. To hear the Green Party trot out the lines of former Deputy Eoghan Murphy and Deputy Coveney about unintended consequences on the private development sector that is not doing its job is completely laughable.

Crucially the Minister of State’s remarks show that he does not understand the purpose of this Bill or the intention of those who have introduced it. It is to increase the supply of land to our public authorities to deliver public housing to meet social and affordable housing need and to dampen house prices and because this Bill does that Sinn Féin enthusiastically supports it and urges all others to do likewise.

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