Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE) | Oireachtas source

I will start with where I agree with the Deputies of the Rural Independent Group. I agree with the fact that, despite years of promises and lip service, the Government has consistently failed to tackle the housing crisis effectively, leaving it scrambling to react to a situation that has now spun out of control; and with the fact that Ireland's housing crisis is currently the worst in Europe, with rent prices having increased more than in any other European country. Those facts are unambiguously true. The Government's claim in its countermotion that it is "comprehensively addressing the housing crisis through a suite of actions to accelerate the delivery of new homes whilst also continuing to deliver on the fundamental reforms" is unambiguously untrue.

The question is why? Why do we have such a huge housing crisis affecting people in rural and urban areas? What is the root cause? It is a reliance on the private market to deliver housing and a policy which has seen those at the top, including the big corporate landlords, developers, speculators and the big construction companies, able to profit to a huge extent from this housing crisis.

This is not just a housing crisis that affects everybody in the same way. Is this a terrible natural disaster that we are experiencing? No. For those at the top this is an enormous opportunity and they have seen profits soar. That is the root cause of the housing crisis, whereas the Rural Independent Group motion sees the root cause more as problems with bureaucratic planning, a need to loosen up planning and so on.

It is unfortunate the motion does not really address the real causes of the housing crisis and that it does not do anything to address the extortionate cost of development land or construction, because there is nothing in it that might threaten the huge profits being made by landowners, speculators, developers and landlords. The motion does not address the failure of the Government to invest in providing secure and affordable public housing that is accessible to all. One proposal in the motion suggests the introduction of a new €20,000 grant aid package for anyone who wishes to build a permanent one-off house on their land. There is no stipulation about any sort of means test. Regardless of how wealthy someone is they can benefit from this €20,000 and there is no stipulation that it needs to be for their use. The reality of that proposal would be simply to put more money into the pockets of the wealthy as opposed to addressing the housing crisis. According to the latest wealth survey by the Central Statistics Office, CSO, less than 9% of the population own land. I would say it is significantly higher in this Dáil than in society at large, yet this motion wants to give them all €20,000, including wealthy landowners in the southern region, where the median value of land owned was €433,800 in 2020.

We need the sustainable development of communities, with the State investing to provide affordable homes, be they public homes on a differential rent or genuinely affordable homes. They must have easy-to-access services, be that public transport, waste, water infrastructure, etc. We need proper planning by the State to provide sustainable and liveable communities for people across the country.

I want to address the Government amendment, which is basically a long set of praise for Housing for All and how it is working so wonderfully and all the rest. The problem the Government has is that is not people's experience. People do not have the experience that Housing for All is working if they are some of the 500,000 young people trapped at home, if they are trying to access the rental market, if they are being threatened with eviction by their landlords or if they are trying to buy their first homes when house prices are almost at a record high. All of those people and their relatives and friends know that Housing for All is definitely not working for them, although some of them will realise it is working for the big landlords and the developers who back and support the Government.

The Government says every time that the following is not the case, but the root of Housing for All and the Government response is a reliance on the market. The Government has two ideas to tackle the housing crisis. The first idea is to give money to developers. They can be given the money indirectly through a help-to-buy scheme, which the motion from the Rural Independent Group wants to extend, so the money passes through the hands of private buyers and then into the hands of developers. This artificially pushes up the price of houses for the benefit of developers, a scheme that was originally lobbied for by the Construction Industry Federation. The Government could also give the money directly by cutting development levies and all the rest that was announced in recent weeks, giving €1 billion to developers. That is one idea and the other idea is to reduce planning requirements and the standards of housing to again increase the potential profits. The root cause of the housing crisis, however, is the sell-off of the social housing stock and the failure to add to social housing.

At the base of the entire thing is that we are completely reliant on the market to deliver housing. When we make that point the Government likes to say the State is building more social houses than ever before. There was an interesting article about a week ago by Lorcan Sirr and Mel Reynolds in The Irish Timeswhich very effectively debunked that claim. They made the point that "Numerically, this is indeed the highest social housing output since 1975" but the context of a population of 3.2 million in 1975 and a population of 5.1 million today means "social housing output has actually halved per capita in the intervening period". Even though the figures are supposedly high, with the reality of the housing need of the population, it is nowhere close to what is required. When we dig deeper into it, as the authors of the article do, we see that about 70% of what is termed as social housing is, in reality, turnkey housing that is bought from private developers by councils. They also point to the vast reliance on approved housing bodies, AHBs, as opposed to the capacity of the councils themselves to build homes, making the point that it is the councils that have the land and that they are in the best position to do it, yet there is huge reliance on AHBs, with AHB output up 16 times over the past seven years. The authors go on to make the following point:

The proposal to abolish development and Irish Water levies for housing, at an average saving of €12,650 per housing unit, is unlikely to deliver housing that is any more affordable for purchasers, but it will inflate the value of residential zoned land by at least 20 per cent. This is welcome if you are a landowner, but not so great if you are a body such as an AHB – on whom the State is increasingly reliant – seeking sites on the open market.

The Government has therefore just made social housing delivery more expensive, while at the same time gifting large landowners significant inflation in their assets’ value. It will also be difficult to unwind this bailout in 12 months’ time.

When the Government does the same thing again and again and it benefits a certain class of people, we might think it is not an accident.

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