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

As a member of the Business Committee, I was the one who asked for this debate to take place. I have been asking for it since several weeks before the summer recess. It was refused before the summer, it was refused until now and, finally, the Minister has deigned to allow a debate but has left before the vast majority of the Opposition spokespeople on housing even have a chance to respond to his speech. The reason I asked for this debate is because I think some of us have some things to impart to the Minister about just how dire the housing situation is out there but, again and again, the senior Minister leaves. This is not the first time he has gone and left in his place a Minister of State who is not responsible for this area. I am sick of it.

The contempt is not really even for the Opposition spokespeople. It is for the people who are suffering, and I mean really suffering, from the housing crisis. An email came to me today from Nenagh, County Tipperary. It is from a woman, although I will not mention her name. It reads:

My husband, two children and I are homeless in Nenagh. We have been told by the council that I earn too much to receive any help. As such, we are staying in a tent. As winter approaches, I am very worried for my children, who are both autistic, and how we will manage. We have been applying for houses with no luck. There are not very many available and landlords and realtors do not seem to want to give us a home. I am emailing you to see if there is anything you could do to help us.

She is contacting a Deputy in Dún Laoghaire about this but the Minister could not be bothered to stay and listen to her story.

In my own area, I am speaking for Magda, who is in a two-bedroom house. She has been overholding because she got a notice to quit on grounds of sale on 2 August. She lives in a council-built estate, where the house is on sale. Because it is a corner house, three other houses could be built on that site if the Government stepped in and bought it. Instead, who will buy it? It will almost certainly be property investors. At the current price, it certainly will not be the people affected by the housing crisis because it is being sold for €650,000. A person would need an after-tax of income of well over €100,000 to have even a prayer of buying that house in a former council estate. Four houses could be built on that site and it would prevent Magda from being evicted.

I am speaking for Debbie, who has been on the housing list since 2009, nearly 14 years. She has three children and she is facing eviction on the grounds of sale. We have asked the council, on Debbie's behalf, to buy that house. We have been saying this to the Minister for years, in particular with regard to the St. Helen's Court debacle, where again a vulture fund bought that multi-unit apartment complex and has spent four years trying to evict all the tenants. They are still there but the local authority has not stepped in and bought it and the tenants still have the sword of Damocles hanging over their head. In the case of Debbie, we have asked the council to buy. The Minister says that, in line with the request we have been making for a long time, he has instructed the local authorities to buy houses where people are facing eviction on foot of a notice to quit on grounds of sale. What the Minister says is not true. That is not what is happening.

I got an email today from a landlady who contacted Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council in July. She did not want to evict her HAP tenant because she is a decent person. She is an accidental landlady and she has to sell, but she cannot sell because she will not put a HAP tenant into homelessness. She contacted the council after the Minister said he had instructed local authorities to buy in situations like this. She asked Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council if it would do it and it said, sorry, but it does not buy where there are tenants in situ. This is after the Minister said he had informed councils to do this. When I look at the circular, it is clear that it is much more qualified and subject to caveats than the Minister implied today when I asked him about it, and it uses terms like “if resources allow” and “if the council”. There should be no ifs or buts. We need a firm instruction to local authorities that where people are being evicted into homelessness, the local authorities will step in and buy those properties. That just has to happen. That is how we will stop the record numbers of people who are now homeless. We need to look at where that spike is coming from. These are families, mostly working families, who are being evicted for no reason other than landlords selling up to capitalise on high prices or accidental landlords who have no choice, but the Government will not step in and buy these properties. It is crazy.

I would go further. I really want to get this out there to the Minister as a serious debate. We should be going further than that. We have €5 billion that we have just put into the rainy day fund. This is the rainy day when it comes to the housing crisis. There are 96,000 HAP, RAS and rent allowance properties out there. We should write to every single one of those property owners and ask if they are interested in selling to the State. It is costing the State and every taxpayer in this country far more money to pay them RAS, HAP, leasing costs and rent allowance than it would if the State owned that property. There would be an immediate saving to the State and it would secure the future housing needs of all of the people in those arrangements.

Let us remember that every single one of the people in those arrangements has been let down by the State. They are all on housing lists because the only way people can get HAP, RAS, leasing or rent allowance is to be on a housing list. The State has let them down if they are on it for 15 or 20 years. That should be done immediately. We could make a serious and immediate impact, a practical impact in the here and now, if we do that. We should also do it with all of the build-to-rent apartments that are being completed at the moment.

Why on earth would we let international investment funds like the pension fund of the arms dealer British Aerospace, as we discovered in Swords, and all sorts of other international wealth asset management operations - the global rich - invest in Irish property to make a fortune by buying up these properties? Is it better that they or the State own the property? We would not be crowding out first-time buyers because first-time buyers cannot afford any of this anyway, and the State can afford it with the money in the rainy day fund. The State could designate some of it for affordable purchase housing and the rest for social housing. If we do not, British Aerospace or some other investment fund will buy it and lease it back at extortionate rates to local authorities and we will pay for it anyway.

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