Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú) | Oireachtas source

Phil Hogan and Deputies Kelly and Coveney and now Deputy Darragh O'Brien have all been Ministers who have stood in this Chamber and said that the housing crisis cannot be fixed overnight. That hackneyed phrase has been trotted out as some kind of defence over and over again for more than a decade. The truth is that this is not an unfixable problem but there is an issue. Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil have an ideological objection to taking the necessary steps to fix the issue. I will give a couple of examples. Approximately 1 million people are in housing distress in the State. Either they are grappling with spiralling rents, they are on housing waiting lists or they are trying to buy a home when prices are going nuts. There are people still in mortgage distress from the last housing crisis who are going around the courts at the moment. Yet NAMA has 577 ha of land and could be directed to provide for 4,000 cost rental houses and 4,000 affordable houses a year. The Taoiseach sat roughly where the Minister of State is today and argued against that. He argued that there is legislation that underpins the mandate which NAMA has to operate and that it was NAMA's job to protect the taxpayer.

Here is the news. The Government can change that legislation whenever it wants. Arguing that there is legislation is not an argument at all. The argument about protecting the taxpayer is incredible. Some 70,000 families are currently on HAP or RAS in the State. At least €600 million is spent by the State and given to private landlords. That money could go to buy or build social housing. There is no protection for the taxpayer in that type of spending.

I will give another example. The vacant site tax is a neon light example of this. When the Government introduced the vacant site levy a number of years ago, I opposed it as strongly as I could because I knew then that it would be a dud tax. It was a dud tax. It was never properly implemented. It never scratched any speculator with regard to the price of land. Last year, it was reported that it took in €21,000. Any Government that produces a tax that probably cost more to draft and implement than it takes in in a given year is a Government that does not mean what it says or is actually so useless that it cannot produce that tax properly. It was replaced by the zoned land tax just a couple of weeks ago. When we pushed the Minister for Finance on that, he admitted that there would be a tax reduction for landowners and that it would not be implemented for two or three years. There have been ten years of saying this cannot be fixed overnight, yet the Government is pushing out the implementation of a tax that could motivate landowners into putting land into use. That shows the Government is not interested in doing it, has an ideological opposition to it or that there is an emergency deficit within the Government. It is an emergency deficit that is not shared by people staying on the streets. There are ten hostel beds available tonight for students. If you are female and do not want to share a room with males, there are two hostel beds available. There is an urgency among that cohort of people that is simply not reflected in the actions the Government has taken.

On the vacant home tax, I sat in the committee, opposite the Minister, Deputy Donohoe, and he said that we should not implement it now because we do not know if it would make any difference, we do not know how many houses are actually vacant at the moment and we do not know their circumstances. There are 180,000 empty homes in the country today. If half of those could be used for housing, it would have a significant impact. A tax could be implemented to get those houses back into use. That money could be ring-fenced and used as a grant to help to get those houses back into use but the Government is not interested in doing so because it has an ideological block. Is the Green Party going to go with that ideological block, as a passenger on this bus, or is it ever going to make an impact in the direction it is going with the Government?

There are plenty of other examples. The capping of rent only happened when the inflation rate got to about 3.5%, which meant that the cap was of no use whatsoever. That is not the action of a Government that means business. This issue could be fixed. The Government is ideologically opposed to the necessary solutions.

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