Aodhán Ó Ríordáin (Dublin Bay North, Labour) | Oireachtas source

Rents in this country have reached record levels and the situation in Dublin is a crisis. Rents are more than 50% higher than they were at the peak of the Celtic tiger in 2008. This is causing misery for my constituents in Dublin Bay North. We must conclude that the housing market has failed. We need much stronger State intervention to increase supply through the direct building of social and affordable housing. We need stronger controls on rent increases and we need to limit the causes of evictions. Even at this late stage of the rent crisis, the whole country still has not been designated a rent protection zone.

It is not too late for the Government to take some action. Tax rates on speculators need to rise rapidly. The calls for rent relief for landlords already enjoying record rent levels must be firmly rejected. The State needs to take on those engaged in land hoarding and speculation. Use must be made of compulsory purchase orders, the windfalls on development land must be heavily taxed and the LDA must be transformed into the dominant provider of affordable housing. If we want to reduce rents in this country in the long term, there is one clear way to do that. The Government must build tens of thousands of State-owned cost-rental units and destroy the business model of those who expect to make rack-rent profits from the rents paid by ordinary workers.

Since 2016, this House and the Seanad have debated a multitude of housing Bills and motions, many of them dealing with the issue of renters and the protections they need. The Labour Party in government froze rent increases for two years in 2015 but, since then, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil have allowed record rises. In our Social and Affordable Housing Bill 2016, my party proposed to limit increases for new properties for lease to align with prices for comparable properties in a particular area. This would have stopped landlords evicting tenants or terminating leases in order to get a new renter in to pay the latest market rent. Fine Gael in government voted that Bill down in December 2016, with the abstention of Fianna Fail. As rents got higher and higher, we repeatedly called for a freeze on increases for a minimum of three years to allow supply to catch up. That was one of the key issues in the 2020 general election. Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil refused to act. Landlords were allowed to set whatever rent they wanted for a new tenancy and to increase it by 4% a year for existing tenants.

The refrain from the Government parties was that our proposal was unconstitutional, despite it having been implemented by the Labour Party in government for two years from 2014.Whenever the Constitution is invoked on property rights, we should always remind ourselves what it actually states. It recognises a right to private ownership but it goes on to state in Article 43.2°:

1° The State recognises, however, that the exercise of the rights mentioned in the foregoing provisions of this Article ought, in civil society, to be regulated by the principles of social justice.

2° The State, accordingly, may as occasion requires delimit by law the exercise of the said rights with a view to reconciling their exercise with the exigencies of the common good.

The principles of the common good and social justice are set out in the Constitution in reference to private property. When people can barely afford to live, when Irish rents are out of kilter with those in the vast majority of similar European countries and when more than 10,000 people are homeless in the State, we can all agree that a case for protecting the common good could be strongly made.

Our Residential Tenancies (Tenants' Rights) Bill 2021, which we introduced last September, would have massively restricted the grounds for eviction and frozen rent increases. The Minister made soothing noises at the time about working with us on it but nothing substantial happened. As a result of his failure to act, there is a plague of evictions now happening across the country as landlords seek either to sell properties at the top of the market or use any excuse to get their existing tenant out in order to put a new one in place. A commercial tenant has more rights if the shop he or she leases is sold than does a family when its home is sold by an investor. Why is this? It is because, for some reason, the Government believes the investor must be allowed to achieve the maximum price he or she can. Where is the common good in that, as laid down in our Constitution?

We all know the result of this lack of action. More than 10,000 people, and rising, are homeless, including 5,054 single people, 3,028 children and 1,366 families. A modern tragedy is happening right in front of us. Simple changes to the laws covering evictions would shield a lot more people. If the Minister wanted to change the law today, he could do so. He has no compunction about rushing through changes on electoral reform and planning but God forbid he do something to stop a family being evicted or a child going into homelessness. Why not change the law to make it binding that any landlord who wants to sell a house with an existing tenant must first offer it to the State? We should put in place a default compulsory purchase order law for people's homes whereby the seller would get the market price, the family would get security and the State would save on having to deal with another homeless case.

As I said during the debate on our Residential Tenancies (Tenants' Rights) Bill 2021 last September, it just makes us all wonder what is the priority of this Government. Whom in the housing market is it trying to protect? There is no equivalence between the danger the renter faces and the danger a landlord faces. We are constantly told that landlords are fleeing the market, but the number of households living in rented accommodation was more than 500,000 in 2020 and that figure has doubled over two decades. The State is subsidising the mortgages and profits of tens of thousands of landlords and investors through the HAP, rent supplement, RAS and other schemes because of decisions made by Fianna Fáil in the late 1990s to get out of the direct building of social housing. The consequence of that is that more than €1 billion of current spending now goes to vulture funds and private landlords instead of towards investment in assets that could provide multigenerational security. We can change that, but it will not happen through the continuous outsourcing of provision to developers that Fianna Fáil is once again engaged in. The State must build and it must challenge the for-profit driven housing model. We can change things, but it is clear that it will not happen under this Government or under this Minister.

See this speech in context