Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein)

I apologise for being slightly late for the debate. A very important session of the housing committee is taking place. The Housing Commission, after almost a year of delay and being ignored by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, is finally giving a very interesting session. I will refer to some of that in my testimony here.

With respect to the remarks of the Minister of State, Deputy Cummins, it is slightly ironic that he criticised Opposition parties for not being here, told us he was very interested to hear what we had to say and then, the moment he finished his speech, he stood up and walked out, as other colleagues have done. I know Members are busy but if the Minister of State, Deputy Cummins, does not want to be accused of being a hypocrite, he should be very careful of the criticism he levels at others when he is guilty of the very same thing.

I chuckle every time hear somebody in Fianna Fáil say it is the party of home ownership. Home ownership has collapsed under Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael over the last decade and a half. In fact, it has never been so difficult for young people in their 20s, 30s and early 40s to buy homes. The rates of home ownership are getting lower by the year because of the Government's policies. With regard to the claim that the majority of homebuilding is being done by the State, as the Deputy for Wicklow-Wexford just said, that is not factually true. In fact, between 80% and 90% of all new homes are built by private developers. The State is buying a bunch of those but the number of new homes being built by local authorities and approved housing bodies is far too low.

Yes, it is true that €7 billion has been spent by the State on various housing matters but a lot of that is incredibly wasteful expenditure, including €1 billion on HAP, RAS and rent supplement - money straight into the pockets of landlords - and another €1 billion or so in subsidies that are not actually delivering any new homes. The actual amount of money spent on the delivery of new social, affordable rental and affordable purchase homes is only about €4 billion, which is why the Government is missing its targets every single year. It will miss them again this year and next year.

I will use the time I have to run through a number of issues of enormous concern, the first of which is the announcement by the Minister for housing today. It is essentially the death knell for rent pressure zones. I welcome the fact that the RPZs are to be extended to the 20% of renters who previously did not have them but the big issue is when. Landlords have now been told that they are coming and the more the delay, the greater risks there are to renters, including those in the constituency of the Minister of State, Deputy O'Sullivan, that they will get even higher rent increases now as landlords anticipate the application of the RPZs. The urgency around that legislation is crucial and I would like to see it introduced immediately.

There is also no great value in extending RPZs to everybody else in the State if you are hollowing out those RPZs to such an extent that they do not do what they originally intended to do. Let us look at the facts. One of the big changes the Government has made is the application of allowing landlords with existing rental properties to reset the rent to market rent when a tenant moves out voluntarily or through a fault eviction, and a new tenant moves in.

Do we know how many of those tenancies are created every year? Last year there were approximately 50,000. That means the first consequence of the decision by the Government is that tens of thousands of tenancies that would not otherwise have had their rents reset at market rents will have them reset. That is a fact. Go and check the data from the Residential Tenancies Board.

We also have this very confusing issue of what happens at the end of a new tenancy. A new tenancy is not just when you move into a property; it is also when your existing six year tenancy expires and you sign a new one because the press release from the Minister stated that at the end of that six years rents can be increased to a market rent. We need urgent clarification on this because it seemed that both the Minister for housing and the Taoiseach were incredibly confused by that earlier. Whatever way we look at it, rents will begin to increase at a faster rate for greater numbers of tenants almost immediately after these rules come in. The irony is that I do not believe the Government will get the new rental stock it thinks it will get by linking new rents and new rental properties to the consumer price index and even if it does, it will be so expensive and in such limited parts of the country that it will simply make matters worse. What we have is a Government gaslighting renters when itsays it is protecting them but when the exact opposite is the case. The Government will make renters lives more difficult in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis and we will keep highlighting that to the Government as we proceed.

I will also talk about the enormous delays in the Department of housing. I am speaking to local authority director of housing managers and AHBs and they are telling us that across all of the delivery programmes for social and affordable housing - SHIP, CAF, CAS, CREL and the affordable housing fund - there is a growing backlog, the delays have gone from weeks to months and that is slowing down the pipeline of new homes. The Minister is denying it. The officials are denying it. They are refusing to provide Oireachtas Members information in responses to parliamentary questions. We had to secure the intervention of the Ceann Comhairle. If the Government was not able to meet its targets last year, the year before or the year before that, it will definitely not be able to meet them now which means fewer social homes and fewer affordable homes with all of the consequences of that.

We also had the decision of the Minister, Deputy Browne, last week - a shocking decision for many - to collapse bundle 3 of the public-private partnerships, PPPs, for 500 new-build social homes across five counties. I have never supported the PPP process; I always knew it was more expensive. However, by collapsing this process two years in, the Minister has created great uncertainty both for those 500 homes and the two other schemes following that. The Minister needs to come to the House as a matter of urgency and tell us how he will ensure the local authorities and AHBs involved will get the money to deliver those homes because we cannot have any further delay.

In regard the Housing Commission, Mr. Michael O'Flynn, who is a very well-respected Cork builder, has presented a very stinging criticism of the Government's housing activation office. He said it is not what the Housing Commission recommended, not underpinned by legislation and emergency powers and will not do the things he, the Housing Commission and others suggested it would. Sinn Féin fully supported the Housing Commission's recommendation of a housing delivery oversight executive. For the life of me I cannot understand, one, why the Government did not do that and, two, why it is trying to misrepresent a bad policy proposition as something other than what it is not. Do not listen to me, listen to the member of the commission who partly wrote that section. He is saying the Government got it wrong and I agree with him.

Then there are the cuts to the social housing acquisition programmes. It is becoming increasingly apparent that the decisions made by the Minister at the end of March and early April are devastating the ability of local authorities to prevent families from homeless through the tenant in situ scheme, and get single people, in particular, out of emergency accommodation through housing first. Why, when we have rising levels of homelessness, the Minister would cut funding for homeless services is beyond me.

Then we have the other delays. It is all very well folks from Government coming into this House and saying that we need planning reform, more water utility connections and more ESB connections but the Government is not investing the money in the staff and in the infrastructure. That is why we have this problem and maybe some of those from Fianna Fáil and Fianna Gael, who have been here longer, should let their colleagues know that you guys have been in government for a decade, you guys have been underinvesting and you guys have been failing to recruit staff - planners and housing staff for local authorities, the board, etc. That is why they are having the problems in their constituencies, not due to the view of the Opposition.

With regard to Uisce Éireann and ESB in particular, a year and a half ago Uisce Éireann stated it needed an extra €2 billion to upgrade water and wastewater treatment so that we could move from 30,000 to 40,000 to 50,000 to 60,000 homes. It is still waiting for an answer from the Government. When will that answer come? Increasingly, we have almost everybody bar the Taoiseach telling us that given the limited grid capacity we have, we cannot continue to allow data centres to connect to that grid - they already take 20% of our energy - at the expense of housing. Everybody is telling us that and I am sure the Minister of State, Deputy O'Sullivan, when he is asked privately, probably agrees. The idea the Taoiseach, Deputy Micheál Martin, is saying there is adequate grid capacity for homes, public transport and data centres simply is not true.

So, where are we at? We have had a decade of bad Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael housing policy: a decade of rising rents, rising house prices and rising homelessness with more than 4,500 children in emergency accommodation tonight. That is a stain on this Government and on the parties in it. At the same time, we are not seeing an adequate delivery of social, affordable rental, affordable purchase or indeed private owner-occupier homes for people to buy. That is why the Raise the Roof campaign has called for a demonstration in Dublin for next Tuesday at 6 p.m. That is why the progressive Opposition has combined to table an alternative emergency Private Members' motion. That is why the Raise the Roof campaign has called for a demonstration in Cork city, for all of Munster, at 2 p.m. at the National Monument on Saturday, 21 June because the Government is failing. It failed during its last iteration and in the iteration before that and I have heard nothing today bit more gaslighting from the Government and Government backbenchers who clearly do not understand the extent to which the Government is immiserating an entire generation of people who cannot afford to put an affordable roof over their heads. The Government can spin all it likes but the facts speak for themselves. The Government is failing and until it listens to us, the commission and to others, it will continue to fail and the people the Government represents and we represent will continue to suffer the inability to put an affordable, secure and adequate roof over their own heads.

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