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

The simple reason we have a housing disaster in this country is that Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have danced to the tune of greedy, profit-driven speculators, vulture funds and corporate landlords. The response to the resulting crisis, which has left us with 100,000 families waiting for more than a decade on housing lists, unaffordable rents and unaffordable house prices, is for the Taoiseach to say we need to pivot more towards the very private investors, driven by a greed for profit, that caused the crisis in the first instance. You could not make it up.

This should not surprise us, coming from a Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael Government, which now includes regional Independents, that is packed full of landlords who themselves make money out of the housing crisis. This is the dirty secret of the housing crisis in this country. Some people benefit from it. The worse the crisis gets, the more that landlords and investors can charge unaffordable rents and house prices. The State needs to intervene and stop the profiteering of speculators, landlords and vulture funds, get vulture funds completely out of the housing sector, build public and affordable housing on a not-for-profit basis, develop its own capacity to do so through a State construction company and control rents in order that they will be kept at affordable levels.

I just find it unbelievable that the Government is going on about the poor landlords and the poor property investors, for whom rents in Dublin of €2,400 a month are not enough. They need a tax incentive as well as charging these shocking rents or house prices that are now at €600,000 in new developments in Cherrywood in my area. It is unbelievable. That was a publicly owned site the National Asset Management Agency, NAMA, sold off to private investors, who sat on it, waited for the value of that property and asset to rise and only started building when they could charge €600,000 or €700,000, prices that are completely unaffordable.

The only people who can afford them then, of course, are institutional investors. Approximately 60% of all home purchases last year were by institutional investors, many of them these vulture funds. They have no interest in driving down rents or house prices. The higher the rents and the house prices, the more profits they make, but the Government wants to incentivise them more. It is absolutely sickening. The housing crisis is being orchestrated by people who make money out of it. We need to get these vulture funds and profit vampires out of the housing sector and get the State to build public and affordable housing on public land. If we could do that when this country was an impoverished, virtually Third World country, we can certainly do it when it is one of the richest countries in the world.

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