Mick Barry (Cork North Central, Solidarity) | Oireachtas source

The English premiership ended on Sunday with Manchester City in top place, Arsenal in second and Liverpool in third. Who tops the Dáil Éireann landlord table? As is well known, this Dáil is stuffed to the gills with landlords. Whereas one in 20 of the general population is a landlord, in this place the figure is one in five and the number is rising. Some 28 TDs registered as landlords in 2022. The figure for last year was 31. Fianna Fáil takes top position on that league table, with 12 landlord TDs, or exactly one third of its total number of TDs. In second place comes Fine Gael, with nine landlord TDs, which is more than one quarter of its total number of TDs. In third place come the Independent TDs, with six; a lesser number but a greater percentage than Fine Gael, making up 30% of the total number of Independent TDs.

Political parties that are stuffed to the gills with landlords cannot be trusted to resolve the rents crisis facing society, and young people in particular. It is not just that those landlords benefit from high rents, which they do. It is that they see the world through the eyes of landlords and their parties are tied in multiple ways to the interests of landlords. We need to clear those parties out of council chambers on 7 June as a step towards clearing them out of the Dáil at the earliest opportunity.

See this speech in context