Gino Kenny (Dublin Mid West, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the motion and thank Deputy Ó Broin for his continuing work on the ongoing crisis in housing. The cutting edge of the last general election was housing and it will also be the cutting edge of the upcoming general election. Housing has been the standout issue for many people. Some people are directly affected, perhaps because they are in a situation of homelessness and just cannot find a place to rent, and there are some people it does not affect. However, the corrosive effect of 14,500 people in emergency accommodation affects everybody. It is a stain on this country that we cannot give people shelter and their own door, putting them under the terrible stress that comes with living in a hotel. In the distant future, we will look back on this time when children had to live in hotels and will see the damage it did to them. It is just not acceptable.

I will touch on a number of things regarding the issue of affordability, which was discussed earlier. There is a scheme in Clondalkin, the Clonburris affordable dwelling purchase scheme. The average affordable home in that scheme costs €320,000. That is the average. The average industrial wage in Ireland is €50,000 per year so I do not know how these homes can be affordable to people who are on the average wage. It is impossible if you are on the average wage and, even if you are on the average industrial wage, it is very difficult. It is highly questionable whether these affordable housing schemes are affordable for most workers.

You could go on forever about the issue of rent but I will pick two areas I am very familiar with in Dublin Mid-West, Lucan and Clondalkin. I will focus particularly on Lucan. The average cost to rent a three-bedroom house in Lucan is now €3,000. Who can afford that? I do not know how anybody can afford to pay €3,000 in rent. It is just absolutely impossible for the average person to rent even a three-bedroom house.

We can see the corrosive effect this is having. The knock-on effect is that many highly qualified, highly motivated and highly educated young people are now weighing up their options. They want to live in Ireland. They want to live near their family and so forth but they are working and not earning a bad wage and yet cannot find a place to live or rent a house. Young people are now leaving, although we hope they will come back, because they just cannot find a place to live that is affordable and reachable. As I have said, this is having a very significant effect on a great number of young people.

Obviously, there is also a great number of people doing very well out of the housing industry. Many millionaires have been manufactured by the homelessness industry. Individuals who own hotels or bed and breakfast accommodation have become millionaires overnight. They have become very wealthy out of this misery. Over €1 billion of State money goes to private landlords per year. If you do the sums, you will see that €1 billion would construct a lot of houses but all of this money is going towards enriching private landlords. I am by no means saying that all landlords are bad but this money could be better spent on improving affordability, sociability and availability. That is the key to what we are talking about.

I will make a final point. I have heard a lot about the Kenny report. I hope I will be corrected if I am wrong but this report was published in 1973. As far as I know, it was produced by a special committee of the Oireachtas. The main proposal of the report was that the State should intervene in the market for land and that it should not be a speculative market. The Kenny report proposed that the State would control the price of building lands in the interest of the common good. I am no expert in the matter but, if we implemented that, prevented speculation on land and ensured it was used for the common good, surely we would not be in the position we are in, where this crisis seems to be getting worse rather than better and where our young people are emigrating. It is not like what happened in the past, when people emigrated because there were no jobs here. There are jobs here but there is nowhere to live. There is no affordability for people who want to live in a city or suburb and not to live in their ma and da's house any more.

This is a stain that will be hard to erase. When people feel very aggrieved, as many people do in respect of housing, they will punch people like the Government, as they did in the last general election and as I believe they will do in the next general election.

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