Thomas Pringle (Donegal, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am glad to have the opportunity to speak in this debate. I want to support this important Bill. There is no doubt it is needed and that the ongoing speculation and profiteering on land values is disgusting and should be addressed. The political system has always made it so and that is why this Bill should be supported in order to try to curtail the political system making speculation profitable. The political system has always hidden behind the single judgment of the Supreme Court and never challenged it in order to provide cover for itself, and to ensure that a policy that would benefit all our citizens, rather than the chosen few who own land, would never be developed.

It has generally done this to facilitate the owners and profiteers who have been supporters of the parties in control or in power. Since the publication of the Kenny report in 1973, that party in power has predominantly been Fianna Fáil. However, for a significant portion of that time, Fine Gael has been in power. What is interesting about Fine Gael in this context is that it could not have been in power without the Labour Party, which today is lamenting that the Kenny report has never been implemented. I read with interest the introduction to the Bill by Deputy Kelly, in which he outlines that this is the third occasion on which the Labour Party has introduced this Bill, having done so in 1990, 2003 and again today. The interesting thing about these dates is that they are when Labour was out of government. Maybe that is the time to do something like this. We have seen how principles and policies made in opposition are left outside the door when government beckons in supporting Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael.

I want to put the following dates on the record: 1973 to 1977; 1981 to early 1982; late 1982 to 1987; 1992 to 1994; 1994 to 1997; and 2011 to 2016. In 19 out of 48 years, the Labour Party has been in government, and they are the years Labour has been in government since the Kenny report was published. Why, then, could Labour not have used one of those occasions to do the right thing? Sure, its Members will say they were only lowly Labour and could not implement the policies they wanted - but on six occasions? There is a saying about repeating the same thing and expecting a different outcome. Not to mention that it was a Labour Party Minister who introduced the housing assistance payment, HAP, that tied crazy rental prices to landlords with the result that €1.3 billion is to be paid to private landlords this year, or that it was the Labour Party which made the austerity of Fine Gael possible in from 2011 to 2016 by keeping the unions quiet, not all of them but the majority of them, although, thankfully, there were some notable exceptions.

I hope there is a lesson here for other parties and individuals thinking about the possibility of government, namely, they should implement what they say and make that a central plank of their policies. That is what I will do. I will be not be putting forward great policy ideas in opposition and then dropping them when the possibility of government is on the horizon, along with a comfy ministerial seat. It gives politics in Ireland a bad name when people see parties sitting in opposition, espousing great policies, and then, when they go into government and get the opportunity to do that, they do not actually do it. They change and everything is left outside. We have seen it with the Green Party in the last year, we saw it with the Labour Party before that and we saw it with the Green Party before that; we see it continuously and it keeps repeating itself. It is time to change that. Maybe the Labour Party can be part of that change, if it decides it is going to do it properly and not do it by selling out.

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