Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú) | Oireachtas source

It is a disgrace that the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage leaves when Opposition Deputies are speaking. Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and Sinn Féin changed the rules of the Dáil so that their speakers would come first in these debates. They pushed Opposition voices further towards the end of the debates. That means that the Minister typically leaves before Opposition Deputies get to speak, despite having listened to his own Deputies in his parliamentary party meetings.

Before Christmas, I raised the fact that, in Dublin, people who are homeless but not from Dublin were being refused homelessness services by Dublin City Council. I raised this issue with the Minister, but he was not here. He learned about the matter a couple of weeks later when "Prime Time" carried out an investigation into the issue. Had he remained in the Chamber, the Minister could have learned a little bit about the homelessness crisis in the city. The fact that he only listens to his own Deputies and not elected representatives from across the State who each were given tens of thousands of votes is absolutely wrong.

Housing is everything. It determines whether people can get work, a decent education and decent nutrition. It determines whether young people can socialise and people's physical and mental health. If a person does not have a home, nearly everything else falls down around him or her, including physical and mental health. The level of human misery brought about as a result of the housing crisis is incredible. Right now, up to 1 million people in this State are in some level of housing crisis whether through mortgage distress, homelessness, spending years on housing waiting lists or paying grossly unaffordable rents and mortgages. Of course, by the very definition of the term, it is the people who are most vulnerable who are hit hardest. In my own constituency, I know it is people who have disabilities who are often left on the housing list the longest. People who are single are also often on the housing list for far longer.

I listened to Fine Gael stating at its recent online Ard-Fheis that it is going to build 40,000 houses. Fine Gael has been in government for the past ten years. Not once in those ten years did it meet the demand for housing. It is always about the future with Fine Gael. If one takes phrases in the future tense away from Fine Gael's statements on housing, it is left speechless. This is a party that has been in government for ten years.

It is also interesting that in mid-May we heard the political establishment state that there is a housing crisis right across this State. For the previous four months, it had mentioned nothing about housing. For those four months, the building sites in this State were closed. Ireland was alone among European countries in stopping all construction of homes during that period. It is absolutely true that we had a Covid crisis.

It absolutely was necessary to make sure that certain construction sites, especially the big industrial ones, were closed, but the fact that no other European country thought it was good enough to close every single type of home-building at the time shows this country's real attitude towards housing. Last year, only 5,073 new social houses were built. Even if one includes the 1,314 targeted acquisitions by local authorities and approved housing bodies, the number of homes that were provided through social provision was less than the number of people who are homeless in this State. That is incredible. There are 70,000 people on HAP or RAS tenancies across the country. That is proof, if proof were needed, that the strategy of Governments for the past ten years has been to outsource the issue of housing to the private sector.

There were 79 homeless deaths on the streets of Dublin last year but the Minister failed to respond on a human level to those deaths. His predominant concern was arguing about whether the deaths were caused by homelessness but the truth of the matter is that the number of deaths in 2020 is significantly higher than the numbers in 2018 and 2019. The peak of homeless deaths last year in this city occurred at the same time that the political establishment was increasing the level of pensions to former Ministers. It is ironic that the political establishment was feathering its own nest at a time when there were peak numbers of deaths on the streets of Dublin.

Right now, no local authority other than those in Dublin records the number of homeless deaths. If one tries to find out what is happening in the west of Ireland, one gets anecdotal information and estimates. The fact that the political establishment and the Departments are not measuring the number of people who are dying in homelessness outside of Dublin is absolutely shocking because if one does not know the size of the problem or the reality of the problem, the chances are that one will not be likely to push resources in the direction of resolving the problem. I know of cases in Cork, for example, where homeless individuals have died. In January 2021, a 69-year-old homeless man was found dead in a laneway in Limerick. The list goes on. We need to make sure that we know what is going on around the country so that it cannot be covered up or swept under the carpet and so that we focus investment in that direction.

We need to collect information but, more than that, we need to stop people becoming homeless. If one asks Fr. Peter McVerry or any of the other individuals who work in those sectors what is driving homelessness, they will say it is evictions and the price of rents. It is as simple as that. It is not complex. The fact that people who are already paying €1,700 every month for rent are being told they are about to receive an 8% rent increase is bonkers. There is no economic reason rents of €1,700 need to be increased by 8%. There are no drivers for that. There is no landlord in this State who has an economic justification for that but it is going to happen. The Bill does not resolve that issue and the Government will not resolve it either.

The crisis that is engulfing many families has come about because Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have been allergic to the building of social housing. A couple of years ago, I asked Meath County Council how many social housing units it was building. It told me it was building three of them in a county of 200,000 people and with a waiting list of approximately 4,000 people. The situation has improved since then and, in fairness, the staff of Meath County Council who are involved in housing are doing their best to resolve that. On the other hand, Sinn Féin, the Social Democrats, People Before Profit and the Labour Party have also prevented the building of thousands of homes. They have an ideological straitjacket with regard to preventing the construction private houses. In the jaws of a crisis, we need to make sure that public housing and private housing are at full tilt. We need to make sure that people in rural areas are able to build homes for their families. Particularly since the Covid crisis, many people want to move out of Dublin and there has been a spike in house prices in rural areas.

Aontú believes several things need to be done to fix this housing crisis. First, we are seeking a relaxation of the European rules in terms of State spending on housing, in line with the €7 billion suggested by the Economic and Social Research Institute. Many people often forget that the European Union has placed a straitjacket on our investment priorities in this country and that is wrong. We need to ensure that builders have access to funds in order to build homes. When we speak to builders, they tell us they cannot get the necessary credit structures to help them to build those homes. The Government tells us the reason it has allowed international investment funds into the country is that they have the capital necessary to be able to build homes and that Irish builders cannot do that. Let us fix that. Let us make sure that builders have the necessary capital to build homes. We need to delete the competitive tax advantages that Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have given to international investment vehicles which puts them at a competitive advantage against families who are currently seeking a home. We in Aontú will launch a Bill tomorrow at the launch of Mairéad Tóibín's Dublin Bay South election campaign. That Bill will walk significantly towards deleting the competitive advantages that international investment funds and REITs have in respect of competing for Irish homes. It is an absolute scandal that Fine Gael rolled out the red carpet to these international funds ten years ago. It may have had an argument at the time that there may have been a need to put a floor underneath the housing market and that it needed to strengthen the balance sheets of the bank but that argument has disappeared. I laughed when the political establishment woke up in shock a couple of months ago and realised this is happening. The Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, had investments in these international investment funds. The State had investments in them.

I spoke to former Deputy Michael Noonan many years ago at the finance committee and he told me that the price of houses was not high enough; that they had to go higher if we wanted people to build them. There were echoes of that from the Tánaiste just a couple of days ago when he stated that the price of houses is lower than it was at the Celtic tiger peaks. That shows the kernel at the heart of the Fine Gael housing strategy - to raise prices in some vain attempt to introduce more supply into the market. Aontú wants to see a three-year rent cap in the housing market. That is needed to make sure people are not pushed out of their homes.

We want to see a proper tax on vacant sites to stop speculation. The Government created a vacant site tax a couple of years ago. Not every local authority currently has a register. There are only a handful of houses on the registers that exist. Indeed, construction companies are bringing the Government to court to stop their sites going on the register and being subject to the vacant site tax. It is not good enough for developers to sit on parcels of land to see their speculation increase in value. The land may increases in value by an amount higher than the tax on the vacant site, so the developer can absorb the tax and still make money by doing nothing on the land.

We in Aontú want to provide a carrot in terms of grant funding to get the one in 33 homes that is lying empty back into use. It is incredible that in counties such as County Meath there is approximately the same number of vacant building as there are people on the housing waiting list. It is an illogical conundrum that this Government has not yet got its head around. We wish to see a significant grant fund made available so that the families that own those houses can get them back into use. However, we need a stick to go with the carrot. If families, investors or individuals are purposely not using those homes or are looking for speculative reasons to keep them empty, there needs to be a tax on those empty homes.

We want to see a situation where the regulations on spaces above shops in our towns and cities are changed to allow for families to move into those spaces and make them into homes. I was raised in a house above a garage in the town of Navan. Many people lived above their shops or garages throughout the country. We need to make sure towns and cities are welcoming places for families to go back to, even more so after Covid. The pandemic has shown us that the social and economic health of a town or city can be wiped out at the drop of a hat if there are no people living in it. We must ensure action is taken in this regard in the future.

Key to all of this is having a government that will take action. I have no confidence that Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael means business in this area. I believe both parties have an ideological reluctance to do what is necessary to fix the housing crisis. They may paint over that ideological reluctance with words and try to ameliorate the problems but they do not want to do what needs to be done. This is especially true of Fine Gael, a laissez-fairepolitical party that wants to sit on its hands on this issue. Its instinct is to let the market solve the problems, but the market is in dysfunction and will not solve them. The truth of the matter is that much of this dysfunction was introduced by Fine Gael in government.

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