Violet-Anne Wynne (Clare, Independent) | Oireachtas source

Gabhaim buíochas leis an Aire. I thank the Minister of State for that information. I welcome that the Department recently undertook a scoping exercise. I hope the review into the differential rent scheme will start and finish as soon as possible. I know that Family Carers Ireland made a submission, and I will deal with that in my supplementary contribution. For now, I will speak about how we ended up in this situation in the first place. The mass sale of social housing from the 1970s onwards is where the cracks in the model began to show. Originally, the premise was that better-off council tenants would subsidise those less well-off by paying higher rents as their means allowed. In the 1950s, this made perfect sense. Unfortunately, the State then made decisions to allow significant tenant purchase of council houses and that has now resulted in price gouging, second homes and Airbnbs stopping families from living in estates in their own towns and villages. Allowing the more affluent tenants to purchase their council houses reduced the local authorities' incomes and forced upward the rents for those left. It also reduced the financial power of local authorities to build new stock and we have seen the knock-on effect of failing to replace the housing stock we allowed to be bought. This is a scheme that was supposed to protect vulnerable people but, unfortunately, it left them even more at risk of poverty. The situation can create poverty traps and discourage tenants from seeking additional income.

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