Mick Barry (Cork North Central, Solidarity) | Oireachtas source

I move:

That leave be granted to introduce a Bill entitled an Act to amend the Residential Tenancies Act 2004 to reduce rents to affordable levels by limiting them to a maximum of a quarter of monthly household incomes and to establish a National Rent Authority for this purpose.

This Bill would make it law that rents be reduced to 25% of monthly median household incomes with immediate effect for new tenancies and within 12 months of enactment for existing tenancies. The Bill also provides for the establishment of a new national rent authority to oversee implementation. Passing this Bill into law is a matter of urgency. According to Threshold, more than one third of renting households are now paying 50% or more of their net income on rent. It is widely accepted internationally that this figure should not exceed 30%. It is three years now since it was reported that the percentage of household income spent on rent in this State is higher than in any other country in the world. This State beat Portugal, Luxembourg, Israel and Switzerland to that dubious honour. Rents have only risen since then. Rents in Ireland are higher than the EU average by a country mile - 78% higher, in fact.

What does this mean for renters and how does it affect people's lives? It means real stress. Will I be able to keep up the rent? If I cannot, will I end up homeless? It means real poverty. What do I need to cut back on in order to pay the landlord? Will I be able to feed myself? Will I be able to feed my child? It means young people being forced to stay at home with parents until such time as they are no longer really young. Many are forced to stay at home well into their 30s. The average age for moving out of home has gone from 19 to 28 in the space of a decade. It means youth emigration on a mass scale. In my day people left because of mass unemployment and, in many cases, because of the stifling atmosphere in society created by church domination. Today it is because there is no hope of buying and little hope of renting or wages being wasted on rent - dead money.

The Government will say that rent reduction will provoke an exodus of landlords from the market. Its position is to oppose legislation of this kind, hide behind that argument and do nothing to address the super-exploitation of renters in this State. Let us take the argument on. Landlords raking in rents of €25,000 a year on a house in Dublin or €20,000 a year on a house in Cork are making big profits. Those profits can and should be cut. If landlords say they will exit the market if their profits are cut, the State should intervene, buy the property and provide a home for the tenant with fixity of tenure. As well as that, the State should build much more social housing to reduce further the share of the rental market run on a for-profit basis.

The last time rent reduction legislation was voted on in this House it was defeated by 14 votes. There are a large number of landlords in this House, mainly in the ranks of the Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael parties. Were it not for their votes, that legislation would have been passed. If the percentage of landlords in the Dáil were anything like the percentage of landlords in society, that legislation would be passed now. Despite the voting down of the legislation last year, however, the issue not only has not gone away but has worsened.

We are putting it down for debate again next week and will put it down for a vote next week as well.

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