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

In my area, if you find yourself having to rent a place, you are, by definition, in a housing crisis unless you are very rich. The average rents are €2,200 per month. To be honest, you would be lucky to find a place for that and rents continue to rise. Let us think about that. You would need after-tax income of €26,000 to pay the average rent in my area. That is completely unaffordable for the vast majority of people. Someone on average industrial earnings would have a bit under €30,000 left after tax and might have to pay €26,000 of that on rent, before childcare, bills or anything else. That is the situation in my area. That is the worst in the country but it is not far off what we have in the rest of Dublin, which is an average of €2,000 per month. Some €24,000 of after-tax income is required just to pay the rent.

The highest available HAP rate for those who get homeless HAP - they will only get that if they are staring homelessness in the face - is €1,850. They are not allowed to look for a place with a rent of more than €1,850 when the average rent is €2,200. If someone is evicted because a landlord is selling the property, moving a family member in or whatever else, he or she is in serious trouble and facing the extreme likelihood of being homeless and being sent into accommodation. That is where it is at in my area. I am sick of it. This has been going on for as long as I have been in this Dáil, which is a decade, and before that. Rents never fell in Dún Laoghaire. I remember when the HAP system - it did not have that name then - was brought in 2011 by Fine Gael and the Labour Party when they said we would stop building direct capital projects. The Government told us not to worry as rents were falling because they had fallen after the property collapse. However, we knew in Dún Laoghaire that rents were not falling and the decrease in rents would not last for long, which it did not, and that a housing crisis was looming because of that decision.

To compound that, a policy was embarked upon under which the National Asset Management Agency, NAMA, which had all this property flogged it off to vulture funds, the same people who are now charging these extortionate rents. In some cases down in the docks, they are charging €3,000 per month and NAMA is still selling property to them. It is not just history. As I highlighted today in Leaders' Questions, NAMA is still doing this. It is touting and advertising the fact that the big corporate investors which can buy this stuff can make a fortune from the high levels of rents that can be charged. This is a State agency encouraging corporate landlords to screw people with completely unaffordable rents and the Government does nothing about it and does not mention it in the budget. It continues to allow NAMA to do it and to allow the HAP rates to remain way below the average rent. The vast majority of people who can even get a HAP tenancy have to top up their rent with money they cannot afford, which is pushing them into poverty.

I will tell the House what this means and describe the harshness of it. I had a young person come into me in the past ten days who had made an attempt on their life when they got a notice to quit from their landlord. The person was also struggling to get psychological and social services in that situation and still faces the possibility of homelessness. That is what is happening to people.

For four years I have been going on about the people in St. Helen's Court who in the last week got a notice from their vulture landlord who took over their complex and who has been sitting on 13 empty apartments for more than two years and who is trying to evict them. They got a legal notice saying to get out by this Friday, as in two days from now, by the end of this week or they will be taking legal proceedings to get them out and they will bang them for costs as well. This is because Government has not taken any action to prevent them from making a no-fault eviction. We should ban no-fault evictions.

How can any Government stand by while a vulture fund does that? I want somebody in Government to tell me what the tenants of St. Helen's Court and other people in similar situations are supposed to do. I want somebody in the Government to tell me that when they go down to the homeless section of Dún Laoghaire Rathdown County Council and the homeless section tells them that they can find a place for €1,850 and that the average range is €2,200, what are they supposed to do? Nobody gives that answer and therefore the families just keep going into homeless accommodation. They are sent into hostels in town, when their kids are in school in Shankill or Dún Laoghaire or somewhere nearby and they are supposed to go in and out from the hostel in town. When are we going to do something about this? We hear talk, talk, talk and nothing happens.

The Minister of State asked for honesty. We have been totally consistent. We never advocated linking rents to inflation, as some of the Opposition did. We never agreed with the rent pressure zones. We have been asking for years for a simple measure, which is to control rents. Set rents, like they do in places like Austria, Denmark and in a number of places around the world. They set initial rents. They do not cap how much they can increase them; they set initial rents. We should set initial rents. It is disgusting that the National Asset Management Agency, NAMA, is touting these extortionate rents when, as I highlighted today during Leaders’ Questions, they have thousands of units, mostly apartments, under construction at the moment. They are going to allow them to go out on the market at €2,000 and €3,000 a month. They could just as easily, under direction from a Minister tomorrow, charge affordable rents based on a third of average income and make them available to people who cannot afford the market rents. The Government could do that tomorrow. There are 24,000 units that they could deliver in the next two to three years. That would make a big difference to many people. Moreover, they are sitting on empty properties.

Another thing we have been saying for a long time - now people in Berlin are talking about this – is to expropriate the vultures. Take them out of the market. They are not contributing anything. Take them out of the market. Why will the Government not do it? I keep asking the Government. It should not have sold them all the property in the first place. It certainly should not still be selling the property by NAMA. At what point do we learn and stop this madness and say that we do not need these people in the market? They are contributing nothing except misery and making a lot of money for themselves. Take them out of the market. Expropriate them, because putting a roof over people's heads is more important than their right to make a profit from their investment. To me that is simple.

On empty properties, there should be a six-month rule. If a property is empty for more than six months, and there is no good reason given by the owner, expropriate it. Take it over. I am sorry, but all the interesting excuses and complications are less important than the obscenity of people being homeless on the streets of towns, cities and villages while vacant properties are lining the streets. Everybody knows it. You only have to walk around this city and walk out of this building to see the places. Some of them are in public ownership. It is shocking. They are sitting there empty. There is one building that was not built for accommodation, but it just makes me sick as I see it nearly every day. If you go past the Merrion gates, you see the Seamark building which was sitting empty for ten years. I think that it was originally built by Tom McNamara. It was just sitting there empty. You could put people who are homeless in there; you could refurbish it; you could put schools in there as we have nowhere for schools; you can do all sorts of things, but it is just sitting there empty. That is just one example that drives me insane because I see it every day. Everybody knows this in their own villages and towns. Why will we not take the measures to expropriate those empty properties, refurbish them and get them to people who need them?

If there's any lesson from Covid-19, it is that when the Government is faced with an existential crisis it has an obligation to do emergency things that had never been thought possible before. Covid-19 proved that when we were really pushed, we could actually do it in some circumstances. We did things that were considered unthinkable. Is the housing and homelessness crisis not an emergency on such a level that we need to do unprecedented things quickly in order to resolve it? To my mind it is. Expropriate the empty properties. Expropriate the vultures. Control rents at affordable levels. Tell NAMA to deliver all its housing as solely public and affordable housing. Ban no-fault evictions and we would make a difference to the human misery that is out there because of this housing crisis.

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