Paul Gavan (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I raise the issue of housing in Limerick. According to Daft.ie yesterday, there were only 13 properties available to rent in the whole of the city. Four of those cost over €3,000 per month to rent and one of them is a one-bedroom apartment. That is something, is it not? That tells us the scale of the crisis. There are simply no available properties to rent in Limerick city. That is why almost 6,000 people are on the housing list in Limerick city. Half of those people are availing of the housing assistance payment, HAP, because they simply cannot afford the extortionate rents that have been allowed to rise shockingly over the past ten years.I will also tell the House briefly about residents in Mount Kenneth on the Dock Road, Limerick. They have seen their apartments run down by landlords and estate management to the extent that even the lift does not work. People on the fourth or fifth floor cannot get up to their apartments without walking. These residents have been given notice because their rents are not high enough. The landlords know when they kick them out, they can increase the rent to between €1,200 and €1400 a month for two-bed apartments. Of course, there are no protections whatsoever for these renters.

We have a housing policy that continues to fail. The well-trumpeted Housing For All policy will not fix this issue. There are certainly not enough cost-rental models in place. We have also seen in Limerick the disgraceful issue of this new model of leasing housing back to the council. The council pays for housing for 25 years and owns nothing at the end of it. Unfortunately, the Deputy Leader's Government has sanctioned and green-lighted tax exemptions for those institutional funds so they can make a fortune out of it and, at the same time, be given far too much leverage over future public housing. There is something fundamentally wrong. In Limerick, we are in absolute crisis and things continue to get worse and not better. I call for an urgent debate on the issue of housing.