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

I have a fundamental problem with the World Economic Forum as a gathering where the world's most profitable and richest companies and billionaires rub shoulders with politicians from around the world, primarily to pursue their own interests rather than the wider interests of society.

One thing of interest I notice was that Hines, the wealth and asset management company and owner of a very significant amount of property in this country, was present in Davos this year. That is very telling. The biggest residential development in the country, the Cherrywood development in my own area, is owned by Hines, although it has flipped some of the property and made a lot of profit. It got the land from NAMA at a discount but very modest houses there are going for between €600,000 and €700,000 and rents are running at €2,500 to €3,000 a month. This is totally unaffordable for the vast majority of people. Is that the net result of these kinds of forums? Investors like Hines make an absolute fortune from real estate and residential development in this country but deliver housing that is absolutely unaffordable for the vast majority of working people and rents that are completely unaffordable. In the case of the Cherrywood development, we still do not know how much affordable housing is to be given to us in exchange for the LIHAF funding. There is still wrangling over how much affordable housing we are going to get and whether it will actually be affordable, that is, what the prices will be. Will the Taoiseach comment on that? This wealth and asset management company, Hines, has €95 billion worth of assets around the world. These are the sorts of people who are controlling our housing sector and the consequence of this is utterly unaffordable housing and rents. Does that not say something about the priorities of these corporations that swan around with politicians at the World Economic Forum in Davos?

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