Paul Gavan (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I am. I want to raise specifically the Government's ongoing failure to grant rights to tenants where the landlord is selling the house. It is a major issue that people raise in my clinic in Limerick every week. People are being given notice, turfed out and paying rents double what they were used to paying. I wonder if Fine Gael policy is based on the 2009 Disney film "Up". It as a wonderful cartoon film about a retired balloon salesman who, at the age of 78, decides to tie balloons to his house and head off with the house to South America. Unfortunately, the Government seems to be under the impression that landlords can do this, that they can take away their houses and withdraw from the marketplace, so we cannot do anything to upset them. We have a landlord-run market and the victims - I meet them every week - are the tenants being turfed out with nowhere to live.It is ideological. I have the figures from Limerick. Under Rebuilding Ireland, the Limerick target for builds was 139 units in 2019. The Limerick HAP target, the subsidy for private landlords, is 511. There is four times the number going on subsidising landlords than on building public housing. Clare is a similar story. There was a target of 100, a HAP target of 264. It is an over-reliance of massive subsidies for landlords. It is an ideological fixation of Fine Gael's for decades. Three and a half years into this Government in the worst housing crisis in the history of the State the number of completed public housing units in Limerick in the first two quarters of this year is 12. That is a disgrace. Words fail me. I cannot begin to describe the people I see each week. There are children living in hotel rooms for months, and sometimes years, living in hubs, not being able to bring their friends home after school. Here we have a Government that insists on a €4 billion subsidy for private landlords rather than making the investment required in public housing.

The trade union movement is organising a petition to the European Commission on housing and the proper provision of public housing. I was at an interesting meeting last week on this issue which was addressed by a spokesperson from Austria who explained the Austrian model. Austria secured a get-out clause of the Maastricht treaty to ensure that it could always make proper public provision for housing. In Austria employers pay a ring-fenced subsidy each month as standard which goes into a public housing fund. We have abandoned public housing in this country. I take Senator Craughwell's point that it did not start with Fine Gael. Fianna Fáil effectively abandoned housing to the market place. We hear a great deal about the right to own houses and so on but there is nothing about tenancy rights and nothing to take on the landlords' coalition that has ruined tens of thousands of lives in this country. That is disappointing.

Sometimes politicians do not like to talk about ideology but it is so important when it has such a negative impact on people in this country where there is this ridiculous adherence to free market ideology in something as basic as housing. I think back to the 1950s when my dad's family got a house. Even in the worst of times in the 1950s, and I pay tribute to Fianna Fáil here, we always had provision of public housings, yet here and now, when we are supposedly one of the wealthiest countries in the world, there are record numbers of homeless. The figures get worse month by month. Perhaps a year into the Government's term of office, it would have been possible for the Minister of State to argue that he was working on it and getting on top of it but the figures continue to get worse. The figures for homelessness in Limerick continue to get worse. The Government's policy is failing. This failed ideological British Tory policy of leaving it to the marketplace has failed. The scramble to build houses now is welcome but it is not being done in sufficient numbers as Sinn Féin's spokesperson in the Dáil has noted many times. The complete fixation with refusing to give proper, full tenancy rights in stark contrast to pretty much everywhere else in western Europe really goes to the heart of the problem. It is the dark ideological heart of free enterprise at all costs from this Fine Gael Government.

It is not an exaggeration to say that 90% of people who visit clinics do so because they are being made homeless. Rents in Limerick have doubled in the last couple of years. Two bedroom apartments on the Dock Road that one could not give away ten years ago now go for €1,200 a month. How is a working family supposed to afford that? This is what happens when one leaves it to the market and when one thinks the best thing to do is to spend most of the housing budget subsidising private landlords, most of whom, presumably, vote for the Minister of State's party. It lets down the vast majority of people as well as the next generation, as others have noted, who have no chance of buying a home. Government policy is still one of treating homes as assets, not places where we live. It is not personal, the Minister of State knows that, but honestly, it is a record of shame. The facts just get worse month-on-month, year-on-year which is why I say Godspeed the day when this Government is over.