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

The housing crisis situation is an emergency and I ask the Minister to take this motion on board. I thank its proposers for tabling it. There are many ideas in it that we in the Social Democrats have put forward.

It was ten years ago, when I was involved with trade union groups and housing campaigns, that we called on Fine Gael, which was in government at the time, to declare the housing crisis an emergency. Every year since, homelessness has risen, except of course during a Covid year, and we have seen house prices and rents rise to record levels. Why have this and the previous Governments never treated the housing crisis as an emergency?

I understand that the Minister is new and is bringing his own experience and perspective, but I am concerned that I do not see any major change in direction or any major reset of policy, which the Housing Commission called for. I do not see any emergency action in response.

The problem is that the housing crisis has become normalised. The level of homelessness we see has become normalised. The generation stuck as adults infantilised in their childhood bedrooms has become normalised. We have a generation who have lost hope of ever having homes of their own. They have lost hope in a future of being independent or of starting a family. We see people delay getting married and having children, sometimes to the point at which their dream becomes impossible. People have contacted me to tell me that. They are deeply upset and traumatised by the loss of their dreams of having children because they could not get homes of their own.

The Minister is new, but he has to accept that this situation is completely intolerable, unacceptable and an emergency. I challenge his claim that we all need to agree on the continued success of Housing for All. If this is success, I would hate to see what failure looks like. I do not think the Minister should just repeat words the civil servants are putting to him. The Minister needs to challenge the Department of housing and say that this is not good enough, where we are at is not acceptable and we are not making an emergency response. We saw an emergency response during Covid when the private health system was brought into the public sector and told that we needed to put everything at our disposal into solving this emergency. We do not do that currently. The Minister has not brought in the entire private sector and asked what we are doing, where is the housing being delivered, where are the hotels being built, where is our construction capacity and how we can ensure it is actually delivering homes. Why are we building aparthotels when we need homes to be built? We have capacity in this country but it is not being put to use building affordable housing.

I will also highlight one of the policy narratives being developed. I have been analysing this policy for many years, that of global real estate investors and institutional investors. They were brought in by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael over the past ten years to buy up, fund and build rental housing. A core policy of Rebuilding Ireland and Housing for All has been to bring in institutional investment. Department of housing representatives attended the global real estate event in France recently, again. The Taoiseach said earlier this year, very clearly, that we needed to look at rent caps and rent pressure zones in order to make investment in rental housing viable. We know it was code for what the investor funds and institutional investors had been pushing for, which is getting rid of rent caps. The Minister has also spoken about tax breaks and about how we need tax incentives and tax breaks to make investment in apartments viable. The collapse in apartment development is because institutional investors have decided it is not sufficiently profitable to invest here. This is not just the case in Ireland, but also in the US, Germany and the UK. Build to rent as an investment has become less profitable because of rising interest rates. It is not about our rent regulation system, but the wider macroeconomic situation. When institutional investors are such an unstable, unreliable source of financing for housing, why does it seem that the Government will remove the very rent caps that are protecting renters to try to incentivise more of this investment? Why is the Minister speaking about tax breaks for institutional investors? Why are we not taking a different approach?

I discussed the potential impact of the removal of rent caps on RTÉ radio last week when I said it was clear that, if the rent caps were lifted, it would lead to a wave of evictions, rent rises and, inevitably, higher rates of poverty and homelessness among renters. The representative from the landlords' organisation, the IPOA, said in response: "I suspect poverty and homelessness would increase" as a result. Does the Minister agree with that response? Does he accept poverty and homelessness will rise if the rent caps are removed?

I am not sure if the Minister is familiar with the term "regulatory capture". It is a concept in public policy that refers to the excessive influence of special interests on regulators' operations and decisions. The result is that, instead of regulators serving the public interest, they serve the special interests. To me, it is very clear that, in housing policy, the Government and the Department of housing have been suffering from a classic case of regulatory capture by different property and financial interests for a long time. From the Celtic tiger boom, to the crash, to institutional investors, it is a clear case that housing policy has been driven by what will make housing sufficiently profitable for the market, developers and investor funds rather than what is the way to deliver affordable housing for the people.

There are many ways to deliver affordable housing.

We set out in our manifesto a way to deliver 15,000 additional genuinely affordable homes. The Minister said we were doing all we could. Why is he limiting what the Government can invest in housing? There are billions of euro of a surplus. Why are we not putting that into local authorities and not-for-profit housing bodies to deliver more affordable homes?

Why will the Government not treat housing as a human right? Why has it done a U-turn on Fianna Fáil's commitment to deliver a referendum to guarantee a right to housing? In 2021, Fianna Fáil brought forward a motion in the Seanad to amend the Constitution to ensure that every citizen had the right to housing. It was noted at the time by the Fianna Fáil housing spokesperson, Mary Fitzpatrick, that the right to housing was about the State making a permanent commitment to every citizen that he or she would have access to a secure and affordable home. In May 2022, the Minister, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, said it was important to hold this referendum, as it would underpin people's housing rights. In May 2024, he announced that an interdepartmental group would be set up to consider plans to hold referendum on the right to housing. Why has the Government moved away from treating housing as a human right? There was not one mention of housing being a human right in the programme for Government. There has been no response to the Housing Commission's very clear recommendation that a constitutional amendment should be brought forward to enshrine housing as a human right. Why is the Government not moving on that referendum? We need to treat housing as a human right. Part of the reason we are in this crisis is because housing is treated as an investment asset, as a commodity, rather than a home and a human right, which is what it should be. It should be underpinning all our policies and approaches.

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