Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I want to say a few things about the principle behind this Bill. I think it is mistaken, although well-intentioned. I do not want to engage in using over-the-top language about it but it suffers from a number of flaws.One has to consider the dynamics of a society and the provision of housing in this country. Would the introduction of this Bill bring us to a stage where more money was available to create a viable thriving and competitive rental sector or would this Bill drive away investment in rented accommodation? The answer is fairly obvious. The long-term effect, even the medium-term and, for reasons that have been mentioned in speeches just now, the short-term effects would be counterproductive. This Bill would not achieve what Sinn Féin hopes for in proposing it. It would in fact drive money out of the provision of rental accommodation, make people unwilling to enter into that market and tend to drive rents up if people had an opportunity to increase them. This would be because they would know that if this was the law for the long term, they would have to provide for future changes in housing market prices to cushion themselves against being landlords of properties which were let at an amount far below the market rate for rents in the area. This is a misguided Bill.

We forget that whenever one comes into a malfunctioning market such as exists now and which is exploiting tenants and one decides to operate with a legislative scalpel on that market, a few hard questions have to be asked. Two or three years ago a friend was thinking of buying property in Dublin and thought I was a good person to look at houses with him from an architectural point of view and to judge their soundness as someone who was interested in it. I went to quite a few properties in relatively well-to-do parts of Rathmines, Ranelagh and all those kind of places, which seemed at that stage to be going for attractive prices. As I walked around, I realised going from one room to another these were bedsits which had been cleared out. I could see the traces of the cookers and whatever else, and the fairly downmarket adaptations of these rooms for bedsit letting. I became more and more depressed at the thought that somebody in Dublin City Council, I think, had decided that bedsit accommodation was to be outlawed and made it unlawful to continue to rent out accommodation in which kitchen or bathroom accommodation was shared or where the apartment was not fully self-contained. I do not know how many separate dwellings were ruled to be illegal in this city but I think it was of the order of 10,000. These were, generally speaking, for people who were not well to do, often single, many of them elderly and this was the best they could afford.

Did whoever it was on the quays who decided at the stroke of a pen to improve housing standards in the city of Dublin think for one minute about the social and market consequences of scrapping that accommodation without working out whether there was a functioning rental market to which the people who were going to be evicted could have resort? It struck me that they did not, although it was well intentioned. Everybody would like to have a top quality rented sector available, but this person did not ask what would happen to the woman or man in her or his 50s who had been in this place for 15, 20 or 30 years when the new law came into effect. Does Sinn Féin really believe this will increase the provision of decent rental accommodation or drive people out of that market? I believe this Bill would have that effect.

One of the consequences of the decision on bedsits is that people now share houses, including the bathroom. They do not have a separate letting of each room, except by internal arrangements among themselves. They may not even have fully functional Yale locks on their doors, but their position is similar in many respects to the bedsit arrangement that was declared unlawful. It is the same thing by another name. The consequence was that between 8,000 and 12,000 people were put out of their homes because somebody thought to improve the quality of rental accommodation in Dublin at the stroke of a bureaucratic pen. I should declare an interest here because I have let a property in the past.

This Bill is well intentioned. It is designed to stop people being ripped off in a rising market where there is low supply, but it will not in the long term increase the supply. It is contradictory to its aim to bring fairness to people who are vulnerable and need to be protected.

We need to accelerate the investment in providing rental accommodation and to take steps which even the Minister’s strategy may not have thought of. I think sometimes that Dublin City Council should operate on a "use it or lose it" basis in respect of land in the city which has a high value but is being left derelict for this or that reason and do what the Wide Streets Commissioners did 200 years ago, which is to acquire it and give it to somebody on a building lease and say rental accommodation should be built now. We need dynamism in the provision of rental accommodation. Every day coming in here I pass Charlemont Street, where Dublin City Council is rebuilding the Tom Kelly flats complex. It was sad to see that a large portion of the site was lying empty for approximately two years while Dublin City Council, which owned the property, got its act together. Local authorities are not the most dynamic. They are slow at turning projects around. There should be methods to encourage other people into developing available space. There is nothing unconstitutional about having a use it or lose it provision for unused property which has the potential for residential use and give people whatever value the site has. It should be handed over to somebody who will provide rental accommodation. I hope the Sinn Féin Members do not think I am being unduly negative but I believe this is a recipe for worsening the situation rather than improving it.