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

The Taoiseach has been scathing of those of use who intend to vote no confidence in the Government this evening, suggesting it is negative and cynical and asking why we do not concentrate on positive proposals. This week, the Government has an opportunity to prove it is interested in positive proposals. The reason I have no confidence in this Government is that as we head into the summer recess it has done nothing to take on board positive proposals to deal with the utterly dire housing and homelessness crisis and the rental crisis blighting hundreds of thousands of working families and ordinary householders.

Tomorrow, People Before Profit have a Bill to reduce rents to affordable levels and link rents to people's income and their ability to pay, in other words, to have real rent controls, which the Government has failed to introduce successfully. Will the Government support our rent reduction Bill to bring rents down to 25% of median income? Why do we need such a measure? We have 320,000 renters and average rents nationally are currently €1,400 per month, which is totally unaffordable for huge numbers of working families. In Dublin they are €2,000 per month on average. That is €24,000 per year for an ordinary family. That is absolutely unaffordable. In my area, the average rent in the past six months was €2,600. The consequence of the Government's failure to control these rents is that we now have record numbers of families in homelessness, including children, as we head into the summer recess, and it is getting worse every week.

As if all that is not bad enough, in a report by Killian Woods in the Business Post at the weekend we discovered who is benefiting from this misery and these extortionate, unaffordable rents. Of the 91 applications put in for strategic housing development build-to-rent apartment blocks, 21 were lodged by investment entities based in tax havens, including the Isle of Man, Guernsey and the Virgin Islands, where the identities of the investors and shareholders are not even disclosed to the local authorities. These are tax dodgers - corporate tax dodgers - benefiting off the misery of people who are paying these extortionate rents. If the Taoiseach is serious about wanting positive proposals, I have a simple question for him. Will the Government support our Bill tomorrow to set rents at affordable levels? This has recently been done in France and other countries, by the way. Is the Taoiseach serious about people suffering from the rental and housing crisis or is he just spoofing?

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