Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú) | Oireachtas source

There are 9,409 adults and 4,105 children accessing emergency accommodation in Ireland right now. On average ten people a month are dying on the streets of Dublin and 60,000 people are currently on housing waiting lists. Eurostat has shown that rents have increased by 100% since Fine Gael came into power in 2011. Houses are literally out of reach and are only for the wealthiest at the moment. The average price of a three-bedroom house in the Minister of State's city, Dublin, is now more than €500,000. That is an incredible, distorted, dysfunctional housing market and significant damage is being done to families as a result.

The Government's target for building houses is only half what it should be. The Economic and Social Research Institute, ESRI, stated that we need to be building 60,000 houses a year. The social housing targets in the last while have been incredibly low. For the first nine months of last year, 2,642 new social housing units were built, shy of the target of 9,000 for the whole year. Some 2,000 affordable homes were delivered in the first three quarters of last year, far fewer than the 5,500 target. The Government has proven to be incompetent at delivering public infrastructure over and over again. Whether it is the national children's hospital, the flood defences in Midleton, metro north or the building of houses for people, this Government cannot do infrastructure. It just finds it impossible to deliver.

Planning is still a disaster. An Bord Pleanála is sending letters to builders stating that appeals have to wait 18 months in the planning applications system, before they will be decided upon, which is an incredible waste of time in a housing crisis. The Government has produced scheme after scheme to provide funds for vacant homes, but have made those schemes so difficult to access that it is virtually impossible for families to draw down those funds. One of the key strategies the Government has employed is to roll the red carpet out to institutional investors, cuckoo funds and vulture funds, to bulk buy homes. Many of these institutional vulture funds are from abroad and it is quite clear that many other European countries are preventing international vulture funds from coming in and buying up housing stock because of the damage it does to the markets. The truth of the matter is that when these vulture funds come into competition with first-time buyers, families and young couples, they have all the cards in their hands. They have access to far lower interest on capital from abroad. They have really deep pockets and the Government has given them significantly lower tax rates than it is charging the families who are competing for those homes. The system is stacked against first-time buyers and the Government has been the main group doing that stacking on top of the first-time buyers. It is a policy that came directly from Fine Gael, going back to Michael Noonan, to roll the red carpet out to these vulture funds and it continues to do damage to families.

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