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

I asked the Business Committee for this debate, which has once again highlighted the sickening injustice of the way the Government manipulates the speaking arrangements. The people who asked for this debate get six and a half minutes after the contributions of five or six Government speakers and the Minister, who does not want to hang around to hear from the rest of the parties. This party has been ringing alarm bells about the housing crisis since I entered the Dáil in 2011. It makes me sick but it is typical of what is going on in here.

We have heard the nonsense and rhetoric about Housing for All and €4 billion a year. I ask the Government to tell the truth. I asked a parliamentary question on this matter. What is actually being delivered in terms of investment is €12 billion in direct Exchequer funding, €3.5 billion through the Land Development Agency and another €5 billion. That totals €18.5 billion over nine years. That is just over €2 billion a year. That is the amount the Government is actually putting in and the rest is coming from the private sector, or the Government is hoping it will come through the private sector. A big chunk of even the public investment is through the housing assistance payment, HAP, the rental accommodation scheme, RAS, and leasing money that is being put into the pockets of the private sector. The Government claims that the State is now going to be the biggest deliverer of housing, but it is not. Look at the figures. Some 57% of the plan the Government is proposing is going to come from the private sector. One just needs to add up the numbers for each of the years. There will be €142.3 million in public and affordable housing and the rest is coming from the private sector. The dependence on the private sector, which has led us to the crisis we are now in, is continued in this policy. That is the truth.

The affordable and social housing plans can be broken down further. How much is the Government going to get through Part V, that is, from the private sector? The Government's answer to a parliamentary question to that effect is that it cannot tell us. How much of the affordable housing is actually going to be affordable? How much is the Government hoping to source through Part V, that is, from the private sector? It cannot tell us. This is more of the nonsense we have had for the past number of years.

The Minister talked about protecting tenants. The test of whether this Government is going to protect tenants is if the tenants in St. Helen's Court, about whom I have been talking for four years and who are threatened with mass eviction by a vulture fund, will be protected from eviction. They are not so protected now. I told this Government and its predecessor that this is an example of how vulture funds are unjustly mass evicting tenants who have done nothing wrong and I asked what they are going to do about it. The answer is zero. The Government does not want to stand up to the vulture funds. That is the truth. The funds were invited in and given tax breaks. I do not have time because our time allocation is pathetic and I have to hand over to Deputy Barry, but if the Government wants an example of what actual radical, emergency action on housing might look like, it should look at what 57% of the population of Berlin said over the past week. They said to expropriate the vulture landlords.

If such action is justified in Berlin to deal with unaffordable rents and a lack of tenants' rights, it is doubly justified here because all of those vultures, cuckoos and corporate landlords got their property from us via NAMA. What had a nominal value of €40 billion is probably worth approximately €100 billion now. They also get tax breaks and day-to-day money through HAP, RAS and leasing. We are paying at every level but we own nothing. They charge unaffordable rents and can evict people. We pay for it, they run away with the profits and tenants are screwed. That is the reality of what is going on. I have been asking the Government to raise the income eligibility thresholds for social housing for five years so that people would not be whacked off the list. Nothing has been done. A review has been promised for five years. It goes on. There is talk, talk and talk but there is no action to deliver affordable public housing, tenants' rights or the security people need because the Government is still dancing to the tune of the big money people who get rich from property.

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