Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

The Minister of State's intervention is totally illogical. He has just said the Government's interventions in housing are targeted, legally sound and effective. Is this why, when polled and asked, the majority of people in the State say that housing is the number one issue for them? Is this because the Government has been so successful in its targeting, its legally sound legislation, its timeliness and its effectiveness? It does not add up.

There is a theme in this Government that any alternative proposed by the Opposition is a fantasy, unrealistic, unworkable and, worse, is not politically real or serious, unlike the great statesmen and women of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. There is a phrase, TINA, which means "there is no alternative". Margaret Thatcher used this frequently. She meant there was no alternative to capitalism, no alternative to the market, no alternative to mass unemployment or to the devastation of people's living conditions. I believe the Government and its Deputies are the children of Thatcher’s politics, which is the political and economic view that says we cannot interfere in the market or in the need of corporations to make profits. Today we say loudly and clearly that there is an alternative; there must be. Whether it is housing, the health crisis or the climate crisis, the market is not the answer. The market is often the cause of the crisis. There is an alternative, and there must be, for the more than 60,000 renters who are spending more than 30% of their income on rents, for those in Dublin who now routinely spend 60% of their income on rent, and for the more than 300,000 people in private rental accommodation who are dreading the next rent hike or a possible eviction notice.

A proposal to reduce by law the rents inflicted on people may be greeted by the Minister of State and the Deputies in Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael with fainting and gasps of horror. They may say the Opposition is illiterate and that it will drive the poor suffering landlords out of the market. This is odd when daily we are told they are already leaving the market and at a time of historically high rents. The Minister of State might need smelling salts when trying to rubbish this proposal. Horror of horrors, we want to set rents by interfering with the market.

In 2016, we proposed a law that would set up fair rents, would ban increases and would reduce rents by linking them to income. One year later, the Fine Gael-led Government brought in rent pressure zones, but what has happened? We have had total failure. We repeatedly brought proposals to ban evictions during the housing crisis. Again, there was widespread fainting and gasping by the Government. We were told this would risk the utter destruction of the market, as we are being told again this morning. Then, in 2020 the Dáil legislated to ban evictions during the Covid crisis. I have a newsflash for the Minister of State: the sky did not fall in.

The Deputies opposite say we cannot interfere in the market. We can improve the lives of the people in this State. We can interfere in the rights of property and the rights of profit and, guess what, the Earth will keep spinning. What may happen and what should happen is that life becomes a little bit better and a little less unequal for tens of thousands of people. The world does not end with rent reductions or rent controls.

This is not 1980. This is not the era of Thatcher and Reagan. We can intervene in the market and we must do so, especially when it is inflicting huge misery and poverty on the people in this State. This proposal only appears revolutionary to the Government because it has a limited way in which it places the corporate landlords and their profits at the heart of what society does in a housing crisis.

We do not allow education provision to be determined by the market, nor should we. We do not allow access to life-saving medical care to be determined by the market, although we do to a certain extent. In Ireland, however, the right to access decent shelter and accommodation is determined in the private sector and the market. It is enshrined in laws of the State that the rents should be set and guided by the market. We must demystify the market. Currently, the market rent is not what people can afford and it is not about what people can voluntarily contribute. The market is about what landlords can extract. Unlike other products where prices are determined by the choices people make, people have no other choice in this regard. People need shelter as a basic for being able to live.

Rents have increased by 76% in the past 12 years because they can. This is a housing crisis where the State has failed to provide decent public housing for its people, and where the private rental market has forced up those rents and extracts every penny it can from ordinary, decent workers. While rents have gone up by 76% in 12 years, what has happened to wages or to welfare? The Government and the Minister of State would attack with glee any group of workers who would put in a pay demand for 76%. The Government would say those workers wanted to wreck the economy and bring down the State. The Government would talk of treason and of holding the State to ransom. When workers demand a pay rise of 10% let alone 70% or 80%, they are lectured on the perilous state of the country’s finances and told sternly that the Government could not give in to such blackmail. It is, however, no issue at all for the Deputies on the opposite benches if Hibernia, Irish Residential Properties REIT, or some corporate landlords boost their investor profits and expect returns that are multiplies of that sum. There appears to be no problem with profits or rents that hit the stratosphere.

In these 12 years when rents have risen by 76%, landlords have crammed people into sheds, into corridors, and into double beds with strangers. State subsides of private landlords by HAP, rent supplement, and RAS has hit €1 billion annually. Stories of websites advertising sex for rent are commonplace. We have not seen a single substantial or real improvement in tenants' rights or security of tenure. What has happened elsewhere? Did wages rise by 76% during this 12 years? Not according to the Central Statistics Office, which says the average industrial wage rose by less than 20%.

Did welfare rise by 76%? Not at all. According to the Department of Social Protection, welfare has risen by 10% in the past decade. What is so mystical about rents that the thought of controlling them by linking them to people's actual earnings evokes such a visceral reaction from the Minister of State and Deputies on the opposite benches? We need to provide decent public housing that is administered and that has rents linked to people's income, to what workers can actually afford. This Bill is more realistic, more grounded, and more based on real life than the ideology posing as realpolitikthat I hear from the Government and its supporters.

In Dublin, one estimate is that a single person trying to rent would need a net income per month of €6,574. That is more than an annual gross salary of €100,000. Those in government are the real fantasists when they think that is a realistic option for the vast majority of workers today, or that the centre can hold when the centre is based on that sort of rental market.

It is an interesting question as to why this crisis has happened. The Minister of State has talked about various ways, but he did not mention the war in Ukraine. Members of Fianna Fáil sometimes like to say it is because they had to make very tough and brave decisions when they decided to bail out the banks. Fine Gael often likes to blame Fianna Fáil. It could also have been when the Labour Party and Fine Gael changed the laws to lure in real estate investment trusts, REITs, and vulture funds with promises of tax breaks. Alternatively, it could have been when Fianna Fáil rewrote the tax laws to allow various tax fugitives and exiles to rest their money here. Another possibility is that it was when the Government stopped building public housing. The simple answer to explain the housing crisis is that it is not really a crisis. It is policy - the very definite, thought-out result of political, economic and social decisions taken by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael through the decades to placate the corporate sector. The profits are not an unintended consequence of the housing policy. They are the intended consequence of commodifying housing, changing laws to lure investors and halting and denigrating public housing.

We have the consequences of policies that are entirely predicted by the politics of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael with their occasional little mates in the Labour Party or the Green Party. That amounts to 10,000-plus people in emergency accommodation, tens of thousands on the social housing list, and another 60,000 in receipt of HAP or other State support so as to have shelter tonight. These are victims of an entirely planned and thought-out economic and social policy. If that is allowed to continue, the future disaster awaiting the next generation is also foreseeable. The ESRI recently looked over the hill and was able to tell us that for those aged 44 to 55 currently in rented accommodation, the future is absolutely dire. They will be in insecure and unaffordable accommodation when they near retirement. They will be unable to carry the burden of renting. The home ownership rate is dropping. If we continue down this road, the adults in this room, the Minister of State and his fellow Deputies, will be responsible for the failed policies that will deliver insecure rented accommodation, leaving tens of thousands of ordinary people and pensioners prey to the market and the whims of corporate landlords just to have shelter in old age. That is the future unless we challenge it. Unless we challenge the logic of the market and those who kneel before it like it was some god, we are in for big trouble for future generations. I remind the Minister of State that we live in a society, not a market, and that society needs shelter and decent accommodation as a basic right for all people.

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