Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I thank Sinn Féin for tabling the motion on housing. I do not think we need to pore over the litany of failures of the Government. The facts and reality speak for themselves in terms of the catastrophic situation we are now facing with the human misery the housing and home crisis is inflicting. There are record numbers of people in emergency accommodation. People are absolutely crucified with rents that are off the Richter scale and unaffordable. House prices are at shocking, unaffordable and record levels. So many of our young people are now leaving the country as soon as they get through college or do their apprenticeship. They are leaving the country in their tens of thousands because they cannot afford to live here. This is the simple reason.

Recently I was in London. I worked in London in the late 1980s when there were an awful lot of Irish people there. In recent years I did not see as many young Irish people in London. I did not notice them. In the past year or two this has dramatically changed. I could not believe how many young Irish people I met in London. All of them were saying the same thing, which was that they are over there - and London is expensive - because they cannot find anywhere affordable to live in Dublin. They are leaving for England, Australia and the Middle East because they cannot afford to live here. They are the very people in many cases that we need to fill the skills shortages we have, build the houses we desperately need, work in our hospitals, teach in our schools and colleges, drive the buses and work in all of the other areas where we are suffering chronic skills shortages. The people are leaving because we cannot put an affordable roof over their heads. The Government has failed to do so. We could do it but the Government has failed to do so.

The vulture funds issue, which has been focused on recently, is a substantial part of the reason for all of this. The decision to unload all of NAMA's property assets into the hands of investment funds, give them massive tax breaks and give them control of the land bank and all the new development has been a disaster. It has not been a disaster for them as they have had extraordinary profits. The consequence is that they drip-feed the housing development that is made available. When it is made available, it is at record house prices that are unaffordable for ordinary working people and at extraordinary rents. In my area the average house price is now €610,000. The average rent per month is €2,500. This means people need €30,000 in after-tax income to pay the rent. This is 100% of the after-tax income of the average worker. People might think there are rich people out my way, and there are some, but I can tell you the vast majority of people are ordinary working people and they cannot afford it.

They are effectively being socially cleansed out of their own community because they cannot pay those rents or afford those house prices. They are in jobs, have kids and are trying to struggle their way through and contribute to our society, yet they end up in flipping homeless accommodation. It is shocking.

Those vulture funds should be banned. No ifs, no buts. They have contributed nothing. Get them out. Give them six months to sell their properties to the State or they will be taken off them. End all of these tax breaks and take those properties off them.

There is something practical I want the Government to do, although the Minister of State will not agree with much of what I am about to say. Most of what the funds are delivering through their increased construction are two-bedroom and one-bedroom units, as they can make more money from them in apartment developments. This means we are seeing a significant uptick in family homelessness. Nothing is being delivered for someone who has several kids and needs three or four bedrooms. This needs to be addressed. I guarantee people that, if they look at the trajectory of homelessness, they will see more families there. While there is some increased delivery of one-bedroom and two-bedroom units – it is not enough, by the way – there are none of the three-bedroom and four-bedroom units we need for families.

We have submitted an amendment to the Planning and Development Bill. Currently, the State gets 10% or 20% of every new development for social housing. It is 20% if the development was started under the new regime that was introduced a while ago and 10% if the development started before then. The new Bill will dilute this obligation. It used to be the case that someone had to give a minimum of 20%, but the Bill will change that to a maximum of 20%. Why is that? This change needs to be addressed. The rate should be 50% or 60%. That is not radical or off the charts. It is what is done in places like Vienna. To put it sharply, what is the point in new developments where 80% of the units being delivered are unaffordable? That is the reality. If only 20% are social and affordable in the current market conditions, then 80% of those developments are unaffordable for working people. This was confirmed today by the Society of Chartered Surveyors Ireland, but everyone could see it anyway from just looking at the prices. That level is pointless. Only the investment funds can afford those units. They are buying them because no one else can, or people are paying ridiculous prices and we are creating the potential for the sort of crash we had before, with people taking out mortgages they cannot afford. We need the State to ensure an obligation that at least 50% - I would say 60% - of all developments be social and affordable housing. This obligation should be inserted in the Planning and Development Bill.

It cannot be set up overnight but we need a State construction company. One of the major blocks to the fast delivery of social and affordable housing is procurement, with regulations forced on us by the EU. We should do something about that as well. Consider the delays in the delivery of social and affordable projects. When the Irish Government Economic and Evaluation Service, IGEES, was searching for the real problem with the delivery of housing supply, it stated that procurement was a major issue. Another issue it identified was what it said looked like land hoarding and speculation. It did not point to problems with planning permissions, as there are loads of planning permissions. We need to short-circuit the speculation and procurement issues. A State construction company could do so. I do not care if it breaks state aid rules. Europe is breaking all of its own state aid rules anyway. We should say that, to deliver the social and affordable housing we need for an emergency, we should not have to jump through all those hoops and the State should build up its own construction capacity as fast as possible. In the short term, we need a quicker process to enlist contractors and they should be required to deliver at least 50% social and affordable housing.

We immediately need to reinstate the no-fault eviction ban. The Government goes on about how the ban did not work, but the homelessness and housing situations have grown much worse since the Government removed it. Some of us, including Deputy Cian O’Callaghan and me, have pointed out time and again that, if someone elsewhere in Europe pays his or her rent and does nothing wrong, he or she cannot get evicted. Why would it be any different here? Why should someone who pays his or her rent, is a good tenant and does nothing wrong have to live in a permanent state of insecurity? I have heard the Government speaking about the need to have a better and more professional rental sector and blah, blah, blah, but it wants to leave tenants in a permanent state of insecurity because it refuses to give them security of tenure, which is a basic thing the people of this country have been fighting for for hundreds of years. It was one of the main motivating factors in the resistance to colonialism in this country, for God’s sake. We need to introduce security of tenure.

There should be use it or lose it provisions where developers are sitting on planning permissions or zoned residential building land. That sort of activity is rampant, so use it or lose it provisions need to be introduced through the Planning and Development Bill to stamp it out. If developers speculate or hoard or bank land, they should forfeit it to the State for the provision of the social and affordable housing that we need.

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