Rory Hearne (Dublin North-West, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Labour Party for tabling this motion. The empty Government benches are indicative of the Government's lack of seriousness in dealing with the housing issue and its lack of willingness to listen to new ideas. This Friday is St. Valentine's Day, and we all know who will be getting the flowers and chocolates from Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. The Valentine's card has gone to the investor funds, with a note inside that reads: "We're getting rid of the rent caps for you. Let it rip with the rents." Of course, the share price of IRES REIT jumped on the back of the Taoiseach's recent statements while poor renters and generations stuck at home have been ghosted and gaslit by the Government's failures in housing and its plans to let rents rise again. Renters are panicking about how they will pay for further rent increases. Has the Government looked at the rents out there? One two-bedroom apartment in Dublin is €3,000 per month while another is €2,600. The entire take-home pay of a nurse would not cover those rents. The Government plans to lift the rent pressure zone caps. What will happen? Rents will rise across the board because of the lack of supply. What will we see then? Housing assistance payments. We will see the use of more public money to support renters who cannot afford the rent, more public money going to US and German pension funds rather than being invested in building affordable housing for our young people.

The housing crisis is a social disaster. Between the 500,000 adults stuck living in their childhood box rooms, the 1 million people in the private rental sector, those who are homeless and the tens of thousands in hidden homelessness, just under one third of our entire population is living the housing disaster on a daily basis. It is causing a mental health crisis of stress and anxiety as well as an employment crisis. Schools cannot get teachers, hospitals cannot get nurses, our community disability services cannot get psychologists and therapists and the very tradespeople we need to build the homes are being forced to emigrate because they do not see how they can get a home of their own in this country. It is an emergency and a disaster but not once in the last ten years have Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael treated the housing crisis like the emergency it is and why would they? It is their policies that are causing this crisis. From Rebuilding Ireland to Housing for All, their focus in housing policy has been to subsidise private developers, bring in investor funds and now they want to bring us back to the future, back to the policies that created the Celtic tiger crash. What an appalling record for Fianna Fáil, namely to have caused two housing disasters within a generation.

Last year, the Government delivered a mere 474 affordable purchase homes via local authorities. In 17 counties it did not deliver even one affordable purchase home. In the capital, in Dublin City Council's area, not one affordable purchase home was completed. It is reported today that thousands of affordable cost rental homes are ready to start but the Government will not give housing bodies the funding go-ahead. The Government hoodwinked the Irish public during the election campaign with its deception regarding how many homes would be built. Now, rather than accepting that its policies have utterly failed, it is recycling and regurgitating the very policies that caused the crisis in the first place. It is making housing policy not for young people who need a home but for the institutional investors. We rightly call them vulture funds but we should also call them vampire funds because they are feeding off our younger generations into perpetuity, extracting rents from them and locking them out of the possibility of getting a home of their own. It is shocking that we are now in a situation where Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael housing policies have brought us back to the 19th century. They claim to be the parties of home ownership, yet under their watch home ownership levels among young people have seen the largest collapse since the foundation of the State. They have turned our younger generations into tenants of the big landlords once again. This time those landlords are US, German and Irish wealth funds. In truth, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are now the parties of the big corporate landlords. This is regulatory capture. They are captured by the funds. The CEO of Institutional Property Ireland, a former chairperson of Fianna Fáil, seems to have taken up residence in Government Buildings. Representing IRES REIT, Kennedy-Wilson, Urbeo and the big developers Cairn, he had, according to the lobbying register, no less than seven meetings between September and December last year with the Secretaries General of the Departments of housing and An Taoiseach, with the Taoiseach's special adviser and various Ministers, including the Minister for housing. Institutional Property Ireland is the puppet master pulling the housing policy strings.

What is needed is an emergency response from the Government, including a three-year freeze on all rents, an immediate halt to the ongoing tsunami of evictions and security for renters through a no-fault eviction ban. The Government needs to ban the funds from buying not just homes but also apartments. It needs to seriously tackle vacancy and dereliction. It needs to tackle the short-term lets and Airbnbs, a policy to which both parties committed to previously but which is not mentioned in the programme for Government.

We do not need the institutional funds. We can fund and build the homes we need by means of a new direction and new policies. There is €150 billion sitting in Irish bank accounts and billions in budget surpluses.

The question is: why is the Government restricting the funding we have available in the country to be invested into housing? We in the Social Democrats set out a clear way to deliver tens of thousands of genuinely affordable homes for sale and rent by the State and the not-for-profit housing bodies leading the development of affordable housing, through reducing the cost of land and finance, directly hiring small builders and providing funding directly, thereby removing the developer profit. We can build affordable homes for sale, like we have seen Ó Cualann do. We also need to develop public sector capacity to directly build homes, increase our construction sector capacity generally by guaranteeing quality employment and develop fast-build factories. We need a new direction. The so-called unpopular decisions the Government wants to make are the ones that will benefit investor funds and developers, rather than protecting renters.

See this speech in context