Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

In answer to the last question, on why the Government has to wait 12 months to do anything, it parks everything for 12 months no matter what we bring before the House.

I welcome the Bill and thank Sinn Féin for introducing it. Watching the ongoing housing crisis, specifically the issues in the private rental sector, including those concerning tenants' rights, security of tenure and rent security over the past five years, has been akin to watching a train crash in slow motion in that everyone can see where we are heading, what will happen and the consequences, yet effectively nothing has been done to stop the crash and ameliorate its consequences. The Government, in its responses, has, at best, played the part of providing emergency services after the crash, in effect sticking a plaster repeatedly over a gaping wound.

One of the first things People Before Profit did when we were elected in 2016 was address this crisis, or attempt to do so, with a Bill. I am specifically referring to rents. We tried to get NAMA to prioritise the provision of public housing on public lands, to stop rent increases and reconnect rents with people's wages and inflation. We called our Bill the Housing Emergency Measures in the Public Interest, HEMPI, Bill. This was a deliberate play on the Financial Emergency Measures in the Public Interest, FEMPI, Acts passed by Fianna Fáil and the Green Party and later by Fine Gael-Labour Party Government because we wanted to highlight the hypocrisy and double standards that surround the debates on rent freezes and rent issues generally. Let me remind those defenders of property rights present, namely those legal experts who faint when anyone mentions rent increase prohibitions, about the Constitution. The Constitution, or its protection of property rights, did not prevent major parties from dipping into the pensions of the public sector and other workers via the FEMPI Acts from 2010 onwards. They did not shirk behind constitutional niceties when it came to bailing out banks; they justified it by calling the Acts that permitted it emergency legislation. We had a financial crisis so we permitted the trouncing of private property rights, which is what pensions are. We have a housing crisis, a crisis that is blighting an entire generation and that sees families roaming our streets while trying to access emergency accommodation, record-breaking numbers sleeping rough and dying on our streets from homelessness, people terrified of the next rent increase or of receiving a notice to quit from their landlord, and gleeful prospective brochures from investment funds informing investors that circumstances can only get better, yet the same voices and Ministers who bravely ignored property rights when it came to the FEMPI legislation are vocal defenders of property rights when it comes to the housing crisis.

The constitutional argument is entirely bogus.

There have been many legal and constitutional experts who have stated this clearly, and I will not go over that again as we do not have time. The question is, however, why we have never attempted to do so until now? Why has this argument been used time and again to pretend we cannot legislate to protect people from the enormous burden current rents are having on them and their families?

We have pointed out before in this House the large and disproportionate number of Deputies who are also landlords and who have vested interests. Indeed, many are the same ones who pretend they are supporting ordinary people or poorer rural communities while also amassing millions in rents and other business ventures. That might be one reason, but I also believe it is deeper and goes to the very nature and foundation of this State.

The obsession with property rights lies at the heart of the nature of the elite and privileged in this country. Since the State's foundation, the elite and their public representatives in Fianna Fáil and in Fine Gael were different from other elites in other nations. They did not get their wealth and privilege from manufacturing or industry, by and large. The biggest source of wealth for the Irish elite has always been property. The fetish around property rights stems from that fact and from the material base that property and the wealth generated from property has played. Those days must end.

Change is coming. It is clear Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are being dragged into that. If we are to address the nature and causes of the housing crisis, however, we will need to push over the next few years. It will need a mass movement to tell the landlord parties the days of their rule are coming to an end, that people will not put up with a housing system built for developers and landlords or a private rental sector built for and on behalf of an elite and wealthy group, and that the housing system is there to provide a basic human right in an affordable and secure manner for all people in this country.

One final point on this issue is that this crisis in rental accommodation and housing generally is being used by far-right and fascist parties to spread hatred and division. We have seen this in the by-election and in material that claims we have a housing crisis because we have too many immigrants and not because we have too many greedy landlords and developers combined with the failures of political parties to address basic human rights. The far right has been allowed to do this with the cover of the Government. The Government parties have let them off the hook and have fallen hook, line and sinker into the trap of allowing others to be used as an excuse for hatred and division in this country, no more so than where landlords have been allowed to impose rent increases of up to 8% under the newly discovered loophole as the Covid-19 rent freezes end. Shame on this Government.

I thank Sinn Féin again for putting this Bill forward and for opposing any attempt by the Government to stop it going forward.

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