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

At the weekend, Mr. Killian Woods in the Business Postrevealed that the National Asset Management Agency, NAMA, was in possession of 54 units - let us call them what they are, namely, potential homes - in Prospect Hill, Finglas, 28 of which were vacant and 26 of which had been empty for a decade. That is an incredible fact for a publicly owned agency. This report confirmed and provided further detail on information that I had received in reply to a parliamentary question recently. When it is all added together, the situation is even more shocking and disgraceful. NAMA is still in possession of 577 acres of residential land that is suitable for delivering housing. In the answer to my question, it was confirmed that NAMA was in possession of 50 units that were sitting vacant and that it also had 1,400 units under construction, 4,600 units with planning permission, 7,500 where planning applications had been submitted or were in preparation, and 8,500 units at pre-planning stage. NAMA has the land as well as assets that are well under way to deliver 24,000 homes, but what is it doing with them? It is selling them at prices in excess of €500,000.

The agency is selling them to vulture funds and cuckoo funds, that is, property speculators and the very people who are driving rents to unaffordable levels and house prices to completely unaffordable levels for the vast majority of working people. When questioned about this recently, Brendan McDonagh confirmed that NAMA does not sell properties unless it can yield a profit from them. Is the Government not speaking out of both sides of its mouth when it says it is doing absolutely everything it can to address the housing crisis and to deliver public and affordable housing while at the same time an agency, fully in the control of the State, which has paid off all of its debts and has €1.2 billion in cash reserves having sold €42 billion worth of property and assets, mostly to the same vulture funds and cuckoo funds, is not being used to deliver every house or residential unit that it is capable of delivering for public and affordable housing only? How can the Government possibly allow a situation where a public agency is contributing to the housing crisis, is facilitating the property developers and, in some cases, as also confirmed in the response to the parliamentary question, is selling houses to these property investors who then lease them back to the local authorities, for which the Government is paying astronomical amounts of public money to these entities? Is that not outrageous? Will the Government issue an instruction to NAMA, as it can do under the Finance Acts, to deliver everything it has as public and affordable housing and to stop its actions which are contributing to the housing crisis?

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