Sinéad Gibney (Dublin Rathdown, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

The Government strategy through the course of the housing crisis has essentially been to increase developer investment - in a nutshell - and it has failed catastrophically. The Government now seeks to double down by creating a system that will result in the removal of the 2% rent pressure cap nationally for new builds. The whole point of building more houses is to drive rents down, not up. This proposal puts landlords and their profit margins above renters and their basic right to a roof over their heads. Housing developers are making tens of millions in profit yet the Government continues to hand out tax credits and cuts and now paves the way for mass evictions to maximise profit. Níl sé sách maith. Ba cheart go mbeidh an gnáthdhuine ag breathnú ar na praghsanna ar Daft.ie ag dul síos. Déanfaidh an plean seo a mhalairt.

Expanding RPZs nationwide is a welcome move but the cap, in line with inflation, is specifically designed to raise rents and ensure all new builds are unaffordable. Throughout autumn and winter, we will see more and more people forced onto our streets and out of their homes. Government policy created a housing emergency, then a housing crisis and now a housing disaster. This Government has consistently implemented policies that benefit institutional investors instead of renters, yet it is keen to keep digging. Measures such as the restriction of no-fault evictions are welcome but are outweighed by the consequences of the rest of the proposed changes.

The Government has failed to recognise its duty of care to those who are already struggling to pay rent or find somewhere affordable to live, particularly those on lower incomes. These people are already forced to choose between heating and eating. The vast majority of people in Ireland are not able to save money or buy a home of their own. There are now multiple generations of young people locked out of home ownership. The hole that has been dug for them is reaching all the way to Australia, Canada and New Zealand where so many people in my constituency of Dublin Rathdown have told me their children have gone. This lack of affordability results in a concentration of housing in the hands of institutional investors who see a house as an asset and not as a family home. These measures make our crisis of affordability worse than ever. The Government has failed to see the real human cost of the guaranteed higher rents as a result of this policy.

As a result of this proposal from the Government, a landlord will now be incentivised to bully out their tenants, or refuse to renew a lease and raise the rent by hundreds if not thousands of euro overnight. The Government needs to recognise that without a serious reset of housing policy, as called for by the Housing Commission, the housing catastrophe will only continue. There will be more poverty, more exploitation and more and more homelessness. There is a solution to this, and it involves releasing at least some of the more than €8 billion in the Government's 2024 surplus to build social and affordable housing, and viewing housing as a human right and renters as people rather than as commodities to be exploited.

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