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

Institutional investors are distorting our housing market. This is not some accident or force of nature; it is the policy of the Government. For many years, a global wall of cheap money has been seeking out the highest yields in real estate investment. In recent years, Government policy has thrown fuel on the housing fire, with all the obvious consequences.

My colleague, Deputy Doherty, has talked about how there is no tax on the rent roll for these funds and no tax on capital gains. In fact, in many cases, they can write off their dividend withholding tax against other costs. At the same time, we have inferior design standards for apartments. Why renters should have a lesser standard than buyers is beyond me. We are also seeing increasingly poor decisions by developers and the board being challenged in the courts incurring further delays. The consequence is that house prices and rents rise, buyers are locked out of the market and the housing crisis goes on and on.

The measures the Government took last year simply make no difference. The idea that an 8% increase in stamp duty would make it more difficult for funds to buy houses and duplexes ignores what is happening with rents. We remind the Minister time and again that apartments are also homes. We need to price these high yield short-term investors out of the market and replace them with public investment, and good quality private sector investment, to deliver genuinely affordable homes for working people. The Minister will wrongly say that Sinn Féin is against private sector investment in the market; that is not the case. We are against the bad investments that push up house prices, lock families out of home ownership and make the delivery of social and affordable homes ever more difficult.

The motion before us presents very clear policy alternatives. Ultimately, it is time to make a choice. Is the Government on the side of small numbers of poorly regulated institutional investors that make maximum profits, or is it on the side of the delivery of genuinely affordable homes for working people to rent or buy at prices they can afford? That is the difference between our party and that of the Minister. That is why we propose this motion and he will oppose it.

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