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

We will not be opposing the Bill, at least at this Stage, because we want to see affordable housing as a matter of urgency. We will undoubtedly introduce amendments on the next Stage and will try to be constructive. We supported the Residential Tenancies Bill even though it was incredibly limited and did not go half far enough. We did not block that legislation. We sought to amend it but the Minister chose not to take on board any of our amendments. We will see what the Minister does with any amendments or suggestions we make on this Bill.

There was a bit of politicking from the Minister at the outset to which I will respond in kind. He referred to pragmatism. The Government and the Minister, in particular, though I have also heard it from other Ministers, wheel out a narrative to the effect that they are the pragmatists whereas we are the idealists who talk about pie-in-the-sky, fantasy economics and so on. As somebody who studied philosophy, I want to inform the Minister that pragmatism is a philosophy, an ideology, and perhaps the Minister should read about it before he bandies around the term. It is a philosophical movement that started in the United State, perhaps unsurprisingly, in the 1870s, with people such as Charles Peirce, William James and John Dewey. It has been updated by relativistic philosophers such as Richard Rorty and the post-modernist, post-structuralist gobbledegook that circulates in some academic circles. Let us be clear that so-called pragmatism is an ideology every bit as much as the ideology the Minister accuses us of adopting. To spell out where we are coming from, and this is directly relevant, I am a materialist, as against a pragmatist. In other words, I start with material reality whereas pragmatism is about essentially saying we have to balance between existing and moving realities. Nowhere is this better epitomised than by the fact that in this Affordable Housing Bill, there are 55 different references to things that will not be done in the Bill but will be done afterwards by ministerial regulation. That is pragmatism in the extreme because some of the key questions we need to answer to deliver affordable housing are not answered in the Bill. They will be answered later by the Minister, depending on circumstances. That is the actuality of pragmatism and to be honest, it is quite undemocratic. I do not know if it is questionable from a legal and constitutional point of view to have that much stuff in the Bill that will be done later by the Minister. That stuff includes, critically, what the affordable dwelling contribution will be, the prices that will be paid, how affordable limits will be set in particular places and so on. We do not really know whether the affordable housing will actually be affordable because that is all going to be done later and is not done in the Bill.

A materialist approaches things from the simple starting point of asking, without anybody having to make profit, how much would it cost for us to build a house? If there are no markets, marketing, speculation and all of that stuff, how much would it cost to build a house? It would cost €160,000 to €200,000, depending on the size of the house. Market conditions are referenced throughout the Land Development Agency Bill and this Bill in terms of how rents and affordability are going to be set. If we did not have market conditions, we could build houses pretty cheaply ourselves. For how much is the market able to deliver houses? It apparently differs in different parts of the country which is strange, in and of itself. In one of the biggest residential developments in the country, which is happening in my constituency, it will cost €400,000 for Hines to build an apartment. There is a big gap between what it would cost us to build places and what the private sector can deliver. What is the average price for a house in Dún Laoghaire? It is in excess of €500,000. The Affordable Housing Bill and the Land Development Agency Bill state that the price of affordable housing or affordable rents will be set by reference to the market and will represent a discount on that market price. The Minister has said that discount on the market rent will be 25% to 30%. The Minister has said that the discount on house prices will be based on the median house price in any particular area. That is a big problem for us and is not going to work. When I say "us", I mean people in south Dublin. In fact, it applies to pretty much all of Dublin, much of Galway and Cork, and quite a bit of Waterford. That is a serious problem.

There is cap of €450,000 for a property in my area. One would need an income of approximately €120,000 a year to pay for a property at that cap. Given that house prices in my area are averaging €500,000, that is a serious problem. I do not see how this legislation is going to help ordinary working people. I have been at pains to explain to the Minister that if one is on minimum wage and happens to live in Dún Laoghaire, one does not get a higher minimum wage. A public servant who happens to live in south Dublin does not get a higher wage from the Civil Service. A teacher, a member of the Garda or a nurse does not get paid more because he or she happens to live in Dún Laoghaire but house prices and rents in the area are multiples of what they are in other parts of the country. If the measures in this Bill will be taken by reference to median market prices or rents, we have a serious problem and I do not see how the Minister is going to be able to deliver in my area. I do not see how he can deliver that level of affordability but we know that if we built the houses ourselves, we could build them at €160,000 to €180,000 or €200,000. That is real, practical materialism. One could even call it pragmatic. Why would we build houses via the market, which is clearly unable to deliver affordability in my area, when we could do it ourselves and deliver affordability? That is the simple question I ask and to which I never really get an answer. It is a sort of pragmatism extremism to insist that we bring the market forces in, even though the evidence would suggest they are incapable of delivering affordability.

The points have been made about the shared equity scheme. In that context, we are going to be paying private developers these extortionate prices under Part V. Can the Minister find me some private developers who are going to be building at affordable prices in my area? I just told him about the biggest residential development in the entire country. I met the developers, who told me it costs €400,000 to build one of those apartments. With that in mind, for how much are they going to sell them?

We have been asking Dún Laoghaire–Rathdown County Council for approximately four years how much affordable housing we are going to get for the local infrastructure housing activation fund, LIHAF, in Cherrywood. We still cannot get an answer. The council cannot figure it out. It cannot work out the conundrum of how we actually get a serious amount of affordable housing for the €15 million.

When the LIHAF was originally announced, 30% of any development was going to be affordable and would be less than €350,000. That disappeared within a few weeks because it became obvious that the developers were not going to wear that in areas like Cherrywood. We still have no idea four years on, and ten years since much of that came into the hands of the National Asset Management Agency, NAMA, and was then handed over to Hines and others, how much affordable housing we are going to get or what the price will be. I am none the wiser today from the Government's Bill, which I have read through, as to how much the affordable housing in Cherrywood will actually be.

Deputy Cowen also made a very good point, which I was going to make but I will repeat. None of the additional 10% is going to apply to all the planning permissions that have been given under the strategic housing development, SHD, anyway, and, of course, we know a slew of SHD planning permissions have been rammed through over the last few years and will continue to flow in until the SHD regime is wound up. I welcome the additional 10% in Part V in terms of affordable housing. However, none of that 10% affordable housing will apply to any of that vast swathe - in other words, the huge amount of stuff that will actually be built over the next number of years, if they build it and are not just speculating on the land, which many of them are.

We would, therefore, need far more radical measures, which I believe we should be taking, and to insist that we get additional affordable housing immediately in areas like Cherrywood and other such areas. We should take much more radical actions to achieve that.

I also want to question the cost rental aspect of this. First of all, the cost-rental rents are again being checked against market rents. I do not understand why that would be the case. Again, a person's eligibility for cost rental will based on income. If a person's income is too high for social housing, then the next category up will be cost rental. A person's eligibility, therefore, for social or cost-rental housing will continue to be income-based but the rent he or she pays in cost rental will differ in different places. That is wrong. It is not fair. Why should it be different? Why should someone pay higher cost rental in Shankill than in Salthill? Give me a good reason. There is no good reason

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