Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The purpose of tabling this motion tonight was to highlight the abject failure of the Government to provide any immediate, urgent relief for those in the rental sector struggling with sky-high rents. The Government has been in office for nearly 15 months and none of the legislation to which the Minister, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, referred has done anything either to stop the upward movement of rents or bring rents down.

I want to respond to some of the comments the Minister made before he left the Chamber. He is right that landlords are leaving the rental market. In fact, we have lost more than 20,000 private rental tenancies in four years. The Government has no plan or strategy to stop this disorderly exit from the rental market. I have been calling on the Minister, as I called on his predecessor, Eoghan Murphy, to put in place such a strategy and work with the Opposition to achieve it. To date, our pleas have fallen on deaf ears.

The Minister referred to five legislative measures the Government has introduced. The purpose of the first of them was to strip the overwhelming majority of renters of the Covid-19 protections introduced by the previous Minister. Bit by bit, with each subsequent Bill, further restrictions on those protections were put in place. As a result, the overwhelming majority of private renters now have no protections, even when they are still experiencing difficulties arising out of the Covid-19 crisis.

The Minister also told the House that we supported his move to shift rent pressure zones from the 4% cap to an inflation-indexed basis. We supported it but we also told him on the floor of the convention centre that it would not work because inflation was already on an upward trajectory. In fact, I have just checked the Residential Tenancies Board rent review calculator, which shows inflation at 4.3%. We do not yet have the legislation from the Minister to address that issue and we do not know when it will be introduced. What we do know is that if another cap of, say, 2% is introduced, that will not work either because it will not apply to tenancies outside RPZs or new rental stock coming into the market and it will not, in the main, be enforceable on existing rental tenancies where a new tenant occupies, both because of the understaffing of the RTB and the lack of empowerment of tenants to make complaints.

The Minister is right that he introduced improvements to the deposit regime for all renters. Of course he forgot to mention that he did so on foot of a USI-initiated Bill tabled by Sinn Féin and supported by the Opposition and the Government. It was only after this that he chose to move on the issue.

With regard to cost-rental provision, I accept that the Green Party has long advocated it, as has Sinn Féin. The Minister promised to deliver 390 additional cost-rental units this year. According to the reply to a recent parliamentary question, only 113 will be delivered. If he could not deliver 390 new units this year, from where will he get 1,500? There will be additional funding for the approved housing body sector to provide an extra 500 units, as well as the 250 it has not provided this year. These are appallingly paltry targets. The idea that the Land Development Agency is going to deliver another 1,000 cost-rental homes seems farcical to me. It does not have 1,000 such units under construction at present. The only way it will achieve its target is if it goes out and acquires those units for the market, which means it will be in competition with AHBs for cost-rental units, as well as AHBs and local authorities for turnkey properties. I do not believe that target will be met.

Regarding the comments by the Minister of State, Deputy Noonan, on an NCT-style certification system, when the Green Party was in opposition back in 2018, it supported a Sinn Féin motion on foot of an "RTÉ Investigates" report called Nightmare to Let. We have shown that such a system can be implemented in a way that would be cost-effective for the State and impose virtually no extra cost on landlords. If 25% of rental properties are to be inspected annually, as is proposed, then a landlord would only have to secure an updated certificate every fifth year, at a cost of €100. I do not see how that would have any negative impact whatsoever on supply.

The most telling remark by the Minister of State was his observation that he hopes market activity will normalise after the Covid crisis. That means we will go back to the chaos and dysfunction of a housing market, particularly in the private rental sector, that has reined over the past nine years of Fine Gael-led government. That is not a good thing and it is not where we should want to go. That is why I am urging the Government to reconsider the measures outlined in our motion to stop rents increasing, reduce rents immediately and dramatically increase affordable, particularly cost-rental, supply, not to a few hundred units a year but to thousands of units every year until the need is met. I commend the motion to the House.

See this speech in context