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

Since I entered the Dáil in 2011, I have been railing against the policies pursued by the Fine Gael-Labour Party Government, the Fine Gael-Independents Government and the current Government in that they have actively encouraged vulture and cuckoo funds to come in and take over what was virtually the entire NAMA portfolio. Now they are coming in to buy up new estates and they are pricing the first-time buyer or ordinary working person who wants to buy out of the market. The policy is inexplicable. The only beneficiaries are the vultures and cuckoos, which make an absolute fortune. They have directly contributed to the dire housing crisis. They have played a large part in creating the dire housing crisis that we now face, that affects vast swathes of our population and that has effectively locked out a whole generation of young working people. It is not just the young, however, because anybody trying to buy or rent is now faced with extortionate house prices and rents that are controlled and manipulated by the profit-driven entities.

The uproar over the latest scandal concerning the buying up of estates forced the Government to offer a token measure. Even the rate of 10% is a bit of a joke. It is a total joke. A stamp duty rate of 100% should be applied to purchases by the funds to completely exclude them from the market. That should be the policy. Consider the proposal to impose a 10% levy if the funds lease the homes back to the local authority. The Taoiseach's excuse for this over the past two days was to say that before we build our own housing, we must have a stopgap, meaning a small amount of leasing is not a bad thing on the grounds that it will help to deliver social housing. He even tried to pit the need to provide social housing against the needs of first-time buyers or young working families who want to buy.

There is a simple answer to this. I want to put it to the Minister. I put it to the Taoiseach today and he did not answer. We should be building our own housing and excluding the entities but, if in the short term we have to source some housing from private developers as a stopgap, we should purchase it directly from the developers, not lease it from an intermediary, namely, a cuckoo fund or vulture fund. The latter is shockingly bad value for money. As the Minister said, there is only a ten-year guarantee on the lease so the funds can walk away after ten years with the asset, making a massive profit. Alternatively, if we purchased the houses directly, we could allocate them for both social and affordable housing while ramping up the programme for the direct construction of public and affordable housing on our own land. What is being done is outrageous. There is no justification whatsoever. The Minister should not proceed with the measure and he should take it out of the Bill.

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