Gerard Craughwell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

Cuirim fáilte roimh an Aire go dtí an Teach. Tá mo chuid Gaeilge uafásach ach is Seachtain na Gaeilge é agus, mar sin, caithfidh mé cúpla focal a labhairt as Gaeilge. Tá an-áthas orm a bheith anseo ag labhairt ar an ábhar seo. Tá fíorfhadhb ann leis an earnáil cíosa in Éirinn.

It is clear that the rental sector in Ireland is dysfunctional. Back in the good old days, when money was flying around this country, we did away with bedsits. Many single elderly people would be very happy to be in a bedsit today rather than sleeping on a cardboard box on one of the streets surrounding this House. Countless Governments have allowed the housing sector to go mad over the years. I bought my first house when I was 23. I was a corporal in the Army and I was able to buy a house on a corporal's wages. I lost my first house because of a bad business decision. I have bought and sold 13 houses since then as I moved around the country with various changes in career. The interesting thing is that once I got on the ladder, I was able to either get back onto it or stay on it. I now have children. One of those children, in an excellent job and married to a man in an excellent job, will never ever be able to buy a house in this country. Why? It is because they are paying up to twice in rent what they would pay on a mortgage.

When I talk about the housing sector going absolutely mad in this country, the houses in my estate went to €960,000 during the height of the property boom and when the boom collapsed, they went to €360,000, so some poor unfortunates paid €600,000 more than the house was worth. With no disrespect to my colleagues in the House, I have heard that Government after Government was going to fix the housing market. What happened? We stopped building council houses and we started to build housing agencies instead. We are pumping in hundreds of millions of euro and I do not even know how many housing agencies there are in the country. Perhaps the Minister of State will be able to tell me how many housing groups are now providing social housing.

The truth of the matter is that unless we do something drastic and do it very quickly, we will find ourselves in a situation where nobody will be able to live here. An important issue is that some of the big multinationals that were bringing in from abroad employees with specific skills, because of the cost of the rental market in this country, had to provide accommodation for them as well. I remember speaking to a senior executive of one of those companies some months before the Covid crisis hit us. He told me that the days of coming to Ireland because Ireland has English are rapidly going. He said that his company could get employees in Barcelona who speak English every bit as good as those who live in Dublin, and the cost of accommodation in Barcelona is about 50% of the cost here.

Having a crack at Sinn Féin for the hell of it is something I really do not agree with. What we need in this House, in this Government and in this society right now is all of us pulling in the one direction, and there is some merit in what Sinn Féin is saying today. The animal instincts of capitalism are alive and well and living in Ireland. It is a great place if you have money; it is a horrible place if you do not. The Minister of State talked about the pressure zones but when they were introduced, there was no policing of them. I helped to find a local authority house for a couple in Drogheda when the house they were renting was for rent at €1,100 a month. When they said they were leaving, the landlord said they could not leave for four months because they had been there so long. We got into a bit of argy-bargy. The woman of the house was walking down the street and saw the house advertised at €1,400 a month. So much for the 4% increase. I rang the landlord and he said that she could leave in the morning because the landlord could get €1,400 for a house he was getting €1,000-odd for. The bottom line is that we can have all the regulations we want in place but if we do not police them, there is no getting away from it.

We are talking now about taking public land away from county councils and allowing that public land to be used for building social houses. On the face of it, that looks perfectly good to me. However, the Minister of State will know that local authority representatives - the people elected to local authorities - are outraged by this. The Government is taking whatever few powers they have left away from them. People will make the accusation that I have never sat on a local authority. Amen, I have not. I have been very lucky to come here without going through the tough route of local authority membership. However, at the end of the day, it is simply not good enough to start to write our local authority members out of the provision of housing. I would like to see us getting back to the days when we built local authority houses and made the best houses available for citizens who could not afford to buy their own.Those who are in rental accommodation are paying the sort of money I am talking about, at one and a half times the mortgage cost. Can we not recognise the rent they paid over three or four years to make a mortgage available? The Cathaoirleach is getting tired of me and I must sit down. I wish the Minister of State and the Minister, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, well. I think he is trying to do something but let us not pretend there is a silver bullet.