Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú) | Oireachtas source

The depth of the housing crisis over the past ten years has been incredible. It is having the effect of gutting families and putting enormous pressure and stresses on families across the country. It is a humanitarian crisis. The idea that the word "crisis" could be so long-term is unbelievable. It shows a real inability on the part of the Government to focus on policy that will resolve it. That inability is not just a lack of ability, it is also an ideological problem. The Government, in particular Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, have significant ideological barriers to fixing the housing crisis in this State. I want to give a couple of examples.

Yesterday, I spoke to a student who is starting college in Maynooth. She cannot afford accommodation in Maynooth because the prices are incredible in that town.

Consequently, she is forced to commute. She managed to buy a second-hand car over the summer with savings she had but she cannot afford the insurance for it. She lives in an area 10 km away from the nearest bus route to Maynooth. Thus the housing crisis is affecting her, as is the insurance crisis, as well as the lack of public transport, and all of this is making her unable to get to college. She also found out her application to Student Universal Support Ireland, SUSI, still has not been processed. It is one of 30,000 applications out of 89,000 that the Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science, Deputy Harris, has not managed to process as of yet. The Minister is spending so much time considering whether to make a complaint to the Committee on Parliamentary Privileges and Oversight that he is not focusing on the job he should be focusing on, that is, ensuring students have their SUSI grant properly processed in reasonable time. The woman is caught in a perfect storm. She worked hard in secondary school and wants to get educated at third level but the State is making that impossible. She is at the receiving end of multiple policy failures by the Government and is just one of hundreds of thousands of such people.

It is reported in today's edition of the Irish Independent that the Minister for Finance, Deputy Donohoe, has stated a tax on vacant homes will not be a game-changer in solving the housing crisis. He has not changed his view in the last year. When I pushed him, when he was bringing about the local property tax, to introduce a higher property tax on vacant homes in order to offer an incentive to get those homes back into use, he refused to do so at the time. He is wrong. The idea it would not change the game is incredibly wrong. In my native County Meath, there are 2,500 vacant properties and they would go some way towards housing the people who are on the housing waiting list in County Meath. There are 4,000 people on the housing waiting list in the county and 2,500 vacant homes. The idea that 180,000 vacant homes are not being brought into use, that nothing has been done materially to bring them into use and that the Fine Gael Minister for Finance has a real difficultly with taxing those vacant homes to incentivise their being brought into use shows again the lack of urgency that exists among members of the Government in bringing about policies and implementing them to make a difference in people's lives. There are towns and villages in the western part of my constituency - I imagine it is the same in that of the Minister of State - where half the homes on the main street are currently derelict. This is when we are in the jaws of a housing crisis. Where is the urgency from the Government on trying to get these homes into use?

Another issue I wish to briefly discuss is that at the start of May, the political establishment jumped up and down about the housing crisis. It was right to. However, it was silent about it in February, March and April. There was not a dicky bird from any of the political parties in this Chamber, other than Aontú, on the housing crisis at the start of the year. At the heart of the housing crisis, the Irish construction sector was closed. Ireland was alone in completely closing the building of domestic homes in the first quarter of the year. If one looks at the statistics, in the first quarter of this year the output of homes in this State fell by 25%. Obviously the Minister of State will say there was a Covid pandemic and people had to take precautions to ensure there was not transmission of the illness. However, the pandemic was also happening in every other European country and none of them closed down the building of domestic homes for the first quarter of the year. This country has by far the most serious housing crisis in the EU, yet we alone decided to close down the construction of homes. If one looks at the figures, Austria, Italy, Slovakia, Belgium, France, Croatia, Bulgaria, Denmark and Finland all saw the production of homes increase in the first quarter of the year. Indeed, if we take the European average, there was an increase in the output of homes in the first quarter of the year whereas in Ireland there was a fall of 25%. It is an incredible situation. Ireland is yet again a radical outlier in the middle of a housing crisis. We alone locked the gates of the construction sites. One might imagine that would have evoked some kind of cry from the Opposition but Sinn Féin, Labour, the Social Democrats and People Before Profit all rowed in behind the Government on that. Many of them were in the zero Covid camp at the time and they pushed for longer and more severe restrictions on the building of homes. In the first quarter 10,000 homes would have been built if we had followed the European policy on construction of homes. Despite all the theatre that comes from both sides of the Chamber, at the time there was no urgency in the political establishment to build homes in this State.

In July, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael forced a Bill through the Dáil to allow vulture funds to have an exemption of 10% from the stamp duty surcharge on the bulk-buying of houses, provided those properties were leased to local authorities. In the space of two or three weeks we saw the Government take a 180° U-turn from what the Taoiseach was saying, namely, that it was absolutely wrong for local authorities to be leasing these homes in the first place, to the Government actually granting the funds an exemption to allow this whole process to continue. Lobbying pressure came on Fianna Fáil from the construction industry and Fianna Fáil did what it does and implemented those requests. My party, among many others, has been calling for a cap on rents for many long years. There is no excuse for rents to be increasing in this State at the moment. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael resisted those requests. When they finally relented on having a cap on rents in this State, they decided to tie it to the rate of inflation. Of course, inflation is now practically at 3%, negating the action they took. Again, this was an action that was too little, too late and with no urgency at all.

I welcome this Bill from Sinn Féin. It is another example of where Fianna Fáil launch a shiny, glossy brochure on housing to a fanfare and headlines which scream that in future, there will be 10% set aside by developers for social homes and 10% for affordable ones. Then they create a massive loophole in that legislation, which will give exemptions to those who bought that land in the past five years and look to have planning permission in the next five years. It was an incredible loophole introduced by the Government, one that will cost the State about 10,000 homes and one that could only have been designed by a political party which sees no urgency to the development and building of homes in this country. Sometimes I ask myself if Fianna Fáil is the political wing of the construction industry or is it representing the people who are calling my office and offices right through the country and who are desperately seeking a resolution of the housing crisis? I ask for the Government to not only accept this Bill and not let it die in the dust but to take it and ensure it is fully implemented. It should rush it through the Dáil in order that we do not have this ludicrous situation whereby practically anything purchased in the last five years will be exempt from those provisions in the future.

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