Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the work of the Raise the Roof campaign and I was delighted to attend its launch in Meath not so long ago.

From Phil Hogan, to Deputies Kelly and Coveney, Eoghan Murphy and now the Minister, Deputy Darragh O’Brien, we have been told that there is no overnight fix to the housing crisis we are in. However, it is now more than a decade since we first heard that excuse being used in the Chamber.

I have three constituency offices. We are inundated with housing issues. Like many Members in this Chamber, I have heard many horror stories in terms of the housing crisis that is engulfing so many families. Housing is in the worst state it has ever been in. I have heard the Government blame different factors for the housing crisis. I have heard it blame Covid for the lack of supply. Let us be honest, in the first quarter of 2021, Ireland was the only country in Europe that closed building sites. Ireland, which had the worst housing crisis in Europe, was the only country to shut down the building of homes for three months. No other political party mentioned that issue in the Chamber today.

During the earlier motion of confidence in the Government, the Minister of State’s colleagues majored in the points that Opposition Members are refusing to bring solutions to the housing crisis to the table, which is grossly untrue. We in Aontú tabled a Bill that would end the tax advantages of real estate investment trusts, REITs, and reduce the competitive advantages they have when they compete against first-time buyers. We tabled a Bill that would end the ability of Airbnbs to function in towns and cities with a population of 10,000 for a period of three years. Overnight, this would increase the supply of long-term lets by thousands for families in the State. We have been urging the Government to get real when it comes to vacant property taxes. The Minister has refused to talk about such taxes for years. We have demanded that homes which remain vacant for long periods of time be taxed properly to get them back into use, and to ring-fence and invest that money into the vacant properties so that they are in good shape for families to use. Despite the urgency of all of that, house taxes are still referred to in the future tense by this Government.

We in Aontú urged the Government to use NAMA land to build thousands of social homes, but the Taoiseach refused to do it. He made the argument to me in the Chamber that building social homes would go against NAMA’s mandate. He said that NAMA’s job was to protect the taxpayer and that this was underpinned by legislation. First, the Government can change the legislation as well as NAMA’s mandate so that it can build social homes. Second, more than 70,000 families are in receipt of rental accommodation scheme, RAS, payments and the housing assistance payment, HAP, in this State. The taxpayer is paying private landlords every month for the use of 70,000 homes. The Government is paying private landlords €1.3 billion every year for RAS and HAP when it could be using that money to build public and social housing. The Government is not protecting the taxpayer in any way in that regard.

Aontú set out a plan to increase of the number of apprentices. We proposed a vacant site tax that would actually work. The last vacant site tax that the Government brought in raised €29,000 in its final year. Never before has a tax cost more to draft than what it collected in a given year. It is absolutely incredible.

I carried out research into the level of vacant State buildings and land. I found that there are hundreds of State-owned buildings throughout the country and thousands of acres of Government land that are actually vacant while we are in a housing crisis. The HSE is the worst offender. It has 137 unused buildings or vacant land. Our analysis showed that the Thornton Hall site, which was bought by the Progressive Democrats to build a big prison a number years ago, is still being used to grow spuds because the Government has not got it together to use it for the community.

The Government has been boasting about full employment, but let us remember that under its economic model, many families with both parents working cannot afford to buy a house or rent a home in their area, and that is a fault with its economic model.

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