Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, Solidarity)

It is interesting in debates in the House and on the media how the Government will not own its own proposals. It tells us that what it is doing is going to increase investment in the rental sector and that will ultimately bring rents down. That is the underlying logic of what the Government is doing. However, it refuses to say the bit in the middle in terms of why this is going to increase investment in the rental sector. This is because the plan is to raise rents. Every time the Government is asked this, it tries to wriggle away from it and say that there are lots of things. The fundamental, most important thing the Government is doing is trying to allow rents to rise even faster. That is Government policy now. It is to increase rents in the supposed hope that through increasing them, rents will come down in the long run. It is the magic of market. The Government expects people to buy this. It expects people to believe that somehow it is acting in the interests of those who it is hiking rents for - young people who are forced to emigrate or are unable to move out of the family home and workers who are being crucified by rents of €2,000, €2,500, €3,000 or more per month - by allowing rents to go even higher, rather than this clearly being an act of a Government of landlords acting in the interests of landlords, in particular the big corporate landlords.

I will focus on the same issue that Deputy O'Gorman focused on, namely, student accommodation. Students are the group that are most egregiously affected by what the Government is proposing. Students in the private rental sector are not going to have any protections whatsoever as regards the level of rents. Every time they return to college, they are going to see a new and significant hike in their rents. The day after the Government announced its new proposals, the Minister for higher education, Deputy Lawless, was in before us at the committee on higher education and I asked him about this. I put it to him that the way this will work is that there will be no rental protection for students in private rented accommodation every time they change tenancy and so on and asked if that was accurate. He stated the following:

We have a new proposal, which was introduced yesterday that will come in to effect next March. There will be a lot of water under the bridge between now and next March. I will sit down with my colleague, the Minster for housing, with whom I have spoken numerous times on student accommodation, and we will delve into the details about how it will effect the student accommodation sector.

I could not believe that the Minister for higher education, who was telling us that a priority was student accommodation, did not seem to know how this was going to affect student, but was reassuring us that it would be grand, there was loads of time between now and March, the Government would sort it out and students would be not negatively affected.

I read with interest the newspaper headlines on Monday. I thought this is good because here we have a Minister who is listening to the Opposition and is going to protect students. The headline in The Irish Times was "Minister wants exemptions to new rent rules to be considered for students sharing houses". It continues: "Students should not be 'inadvertently disadvantaged' by the new regime, says spokesman for James Lawless." On Tuesday, however, presumably all of the water under the bridge had passed. We read in the front-page headline in the Irish Independent that there are "No additional protections for students in private sector under new rental rules, Minister admits". That is it. I was accurate in my summation of things at the committee. In saying that there was a load of water going to pass under the bridge and do not worry things will be fine by March, the Minister was trying to mislead people, or he did not know what was happening. The truth is that students are being thrown to the wolves by this proposal. It is incredible, when housing is the number one crisis facing the third level education system, that students are going to be taken out of any protection whatsoever.

There are a few things that the Government often likes to say to the Opposition. It says that we have no proposals. We can write books on it, as two Members have. We can put forward detailed proposals on budget proposals and in policy, but no matter what we do the Government will say that we have no proposals. No matter the level of detail that we produce, it will say that we have no proposals. The other thing it will say is that the Opposition is being ideological or that we have an ideological aversion to the private rental market. We are expected to believe that the Government has no ideology whatsoever. For ten years now, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have been trying to incentivise the private sector, be it private developers or the institutional investors, to come and resolve the housing crisis. Money has been thrown at them. They do not pay any taxes on rental income when they are real estate investment trusts, REITs.

There is the Croí Cónaithe scheme and the HAP scheme, which costs more than €1 billion per year, and there are other subsidises to landlords every single year. There is the waiver of development levies. Money is thrown at these developers and private landlords. The crisis has got worse not better. The Government goes back into the same toolbox - one marked "free market fundamentalism" - and says we need rents to rise further because that is what is going to resolve the crisis as it will attract investment. The Government expects us to believe that it has no ideology. It is free market fundamentalism. It is a trickle-down idea of what is going to happen with housing.

It is interesting to read the report that the Government is basing its own proposals on rental pressure zones and increasing rents further. It is clear there that institutional investors are making healthy profits in the rental sector in Ireland. They are not making a loss; they are making a healthy profit. The idea is that we need to give them even more profit so that they invest here in this sector rather than somewhere else. How, without free market fundamentalist ideology, does it make any sense that we transfer more money of workers, either directly or indirectly through the State or directly from workers through paying more rent, to the super rich in the hope that they are will resolve the housing crisis? How does that make sense as opposed to saying that we have money and financial surpluses, we have a housing crisis, building housing creates revenue and we therefore need to build social and genuinely affordable housing at scale, directly through a State construction company? That is the answer to the housing crisis and the centre of the answer for supply. The reason it is not pursued is ideology and what lies behind that ideology are class interests. The Government fundamentally does not represent renters, workers and young people. Instead, it represents big landlords, big private developers and the rest.

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