Mattie McGrath (Tipperary, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I wish to continue on the same theme because my office is overrun with unfortunate people who are looking to rent, have notices to quit and cannot get properties, etc. We have a perfect storm here. We have parties on the left, and some on the middle left, that are demonising landlords. Some landlords are accidental landlords and never wanted to be. We cannot keep demonising the developers, builders and others as bad people. There were some rogues but there are bad apples in every area. All day today and yesterday people were demonising the sisters who provided the maternity care in this country for generations. Now we want to demonise them. We are getting a 300-year lease. Where would you get the like of it? Do we want to pay the going rate for it? If we do, we should buy the land.

Getting back to housing, the same people are objecting to this and objecting to that and demonising the landlords. We must have the people with the wherewithal to borrow and the brains to finance this. They have the brains and skills and are able to build the houses. We must deliver more housing; it is as simple as that. There must be private housing. The local authorities are not building the houses. They fell off the cliff long ago when it comes to providing housing. We must go back to that but we must also support the small builders. Ní neart go cur le chéile. We must allow people build houses of their own. We must bring down rents that way because when the commodity is scarce, the cost goes up and up and up.

We have passed more regulations in here in the last ten years, and I did five years on the housing committee, and all we were doing is passing legislation making it more difficult and more people who provided houses and flats were getting out of the land. We closed all the bedsits in Dublin. Would many people not be glad of them now? We closed all of them with mad legislation too. We do not think beyond our nose, beyond the Pale or beyond what we are doing today and the implications this legislation and these rules are having. It is time we had a wake-up call in this House as well.

See this speech in context