Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to speak on the motion. This is the third such motion. They have all been ruled out by the Government's vote.

I am unhappy with a piecemeal approach to the housing crisis. I find myself unable not to support the motion, although it is discriminatory. It is not targeted, although it is calling for a targeted scheme from the Government and it does not say for how long. I have no choice but to support this, given the crisis.

The Minister confirmed in his contribution that there are more than 27,000 households in serious arrears of the 100,000 that went over to the vulture funds in the beginning. He acknowledged that an increasing number of householders will be in trouble. He set out some very minor changes that the various banking entities will take, which I welcome.

However, it has to be realised that we are in this situation because of housing policy over a long time. Since my election in 2016, I and my colleagues have repeatedly asked the Government to change its policy. I have watched documents come forward - the names of them mingle in my head - with the exact same approach, but just slightly different language, that the market will provide and when the market does not provide, as it has utterly failed to provide houses, we jump in to save it.

I have lost track of the number of schemes that this and the previous Government have brought in. The help-to-buy scheme, which the Government constantly praises, has helped. However, more than one third of the people availing of that simply did not need help. That is set out in the various analyses done on it. That is only one of the many schemes, along with the housing assistance payment, HAP, scheme, and the rental accommodation scheme, RAS, that have helped to keep the prices of houses artificially high. The price of houses is an obscenity. It is simply an obscenity that we are helping people with a first-time grant to buy houses that are €500,000. That is not sustainable. The prices of houses in Ireland, including my own, have to come down.

We need to have active engagement by the State in providing public housing on public land. We are not doing that either. We have put in another layer of bureaucracy with the Land Development Agency. We have further deprived the local authorities of their capability to use their resources to build houses, etc., and we keep doing it.

If we try to analyse that as best we can in a rational manner, the Government tells us we are against everything or we are against homeownership. I am fortunate enough to own my home. If people want to own their home, I will fully support them, but what I want from Government is a provision of choices in that we give people the choice to rent at a controlled rent as well as the option to buy houses at a reasonable price. We are not doing that.

The Government is putting more than €1 billion a year into the market - into landlords' pockets. If I mention the word "landlord", I am accused of being anti-landlord. We absolutely need landlords, but what we need is a strong policy from the Government that says a home is not something to be traded on the market. That is what we have done. We have made it into a commodity to be traded.

I support the motion. I thank the Parliamentary Budget Office, PBO, for producing a background note on the bank levy, which is very interesting. It has helped my understanding of it. The bank levy came in before my time as a TD in 2014. It was supposed to be temporary; it has been renewed since. It was supposed to bring in €150 million per year. It has not done that. It was down to €86.7 million in 2022 for various reasons, because of the way it is measured and because we allowed the banks that exited the Irish market, Ulster Bank and the other bank, be exempted from it because if the State tried to put a levy on them, they would run even quicker and leave us in a mess.

Where are we now? The PBO tells us that because of the ECB raising interest rates ten times, as has been pointed out in the motion, banks and credit institutions are making obscene profits that are not being passed on to the people who saved - there was no interest for their deposit - and they kept it. No Government has seen fit to say this is wrong. These are the banks that we bailed out. Helpfully, the PBO tells us that the bank levy was first introduced in 2014. As I said, it was supposed to bring in €150 million because of the financial crisis that the banks were an integral part of. The State decided to bring in the bank levy because it had given more than €29 billion to three banks and it had given €35 billion to the defunct Anglo Irish Bank. That is the background here that we are forgetting about in relation to why the levy was brought in. It points out clearly, as a result of the changes in the interest rate, that is absolutely helping them to make profit.

I am not an accountant and I have no financial background. I try and I read, and I struggle. What I see here is that ordinary people are caught up in an obscene game in the financial markets and where profits can be made by the ECB increasing interest rates, ostensibly, to control inflation but allowing banks to increase their profits and not pass it on, and allowing vulture funds to buy up in excess of 100,000 loans and cause absolute distress to the householders.

I am here tonight telling the Minister of State, Deputy Peter Burke, clearly that I do not like this type of motion, not that I am unhappy with Sinn Féin but that we would need this type of motion. It has to be targeted, it has to be specific but it has to be an overall package of transformation in saying that Government has the primary responsibility, both in policy and in actual houses on the ground, to determine where we are going as a country.

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