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

I too am looking for clarification on this. There may be a slight difference of opinion with my comrades and colleagues in the Opposition on this, or there may not. This is why I want clarification from the Minister. I am very much against anything that is going to reinforce or underpin unaffordable house prices as they exist in the epicentre of the housing crisis at the moment. Any kind of influence the unaffordable market price might have on the actual price of affordable housing that is delivered by the State is unacceptable to me. This is the fundamental problem. It should have no influence because at the moment the market is the problem. It is out of the reach of 70% to 80% of people. They just cannot afford these house prices. This is most certainly the case in my area and in most of Dublin, and in many of the other urban centres, although not exclusively. The State needs to do something that breaks with this logic if it is going to deliver housing that is genuinely affordable.

In this legislation and all the other housing legislation that he trumpets, the Minister not only leaves the door open for the market, he also explicitly brings the market back in and brings in private interests that are concerned with market prices and profits they can make. I believe this guarantees unaffordability.

If it is a choice between a vulture or a cuckoo fund buying up a housing estate, or a local authority, I would rather the local authority bought it. This is the point I made yesterday about the stamp duty tax incentive that is being given to the vulture funds. The Taoiseach implied that if the local authority stepped in and bought that housing instead of the vulture funds, that somehow this would impact on first-time buyers. It would not. That is a deliberate misrepresentation of what I said yesterday, which was that this is not the choice. The choice is that these vulture or cuckoo funds are coming in and buying up estates and that we should do everything we can to stop that, and that if a local authority stepped in to purchase those homes and then allocated them for affordable and social housing, they could ensure some affordability. The criteria for affordability should be set by the local authority and real affordability could be based on incomes and on the delivery of social housing. The Minister needs to clarify this because we do not want the open market in any shape or form to dictate the cost of affordable housing.

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