Rebecca Moynihan (Labour) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the people in the Gallery. I also commend the Civil Engagement Group which, as always, has put forward a well-thought out, policy-driven motion and a Private Members' Bill.

I will focus on one specific aspect and type of housing, which is renting. That is where there is huge insecurity and precariousness. Just as we came into this Chamber, the Parliamentary Budget Office put out a report on housing. It states that:

The reliance of the State on meeting housing needs through current funded supports to private rental tenancies (reaching 38% of all private rental tenancies at end 2020) is only viable, in the long-term, in housing markets with sufficient housing supply. However, rising rents and limited supply of private rental properties – from which current funded housing are mostly sourced - can result in long-term needs being met through short-term and comparatively precarious accommodation solutions. These households’ social housing needs are increasingly hard to meet from the private market, with the combination of limited supply of new or additional units, and rising rental costs within the sector.

I think that gets to the heart of the problem and the issue in the housing sector. It feeds particularly well into the motion that has been tabled by the Civil Engagement Group, which is essentially advocating for a shift in how housing policy is run in this country.

We did have shifts in housing policy at the end of the 1980s and, especially, in the 2000s, away from supporting homeownership and State-built social housing to supporting the private rental sector. Then we had the financial crash, our construction sector dried up and the supply dried up. Ten years on, the fallacy and danger of, and the risks associated with, the ticking over, so to speak, of social housing supports in the private rented sector are now coming home to the roost.

Renters in Ireland have always been treated like second-class citizens. That is the long and the short of it. Everything this motion seeks to note is fact. It is a fact that the cost of renting in this country has gone out of the reach of the ordinary person. In Dublin, rent is more than €2,000. Every single county in this country has seen rental increases that have broken the consumer price index as well as the old 4% limit in rent pressure zones, RPZs. Some counties are seeing double digit increases. Some counties are seeing increases of up to 20% in one year in the cost of renting.

I am a mortgage holder. If I had at the very base level, which is 2% of an increase every year on my mortgage, you would soon be hearing about it from mortgage holders. Yet we take this as something normal that happens to renters. We are told we cannot possibly have something like a rent freeze because that will take up supply and will stop supply. However, the reality is that a short-term, well-targeted rent freeze is something we can do from a State perspective. It is a real intervention we can make, and not just to stop rent increases, because at this stage we need rents to fall. That is where we are at. We need rents to fall. For our renting to be affordable, and I will use the example of Dublin, you have to have a net household income of €6,000 per month, either through one person or two people. That is out of the reach of many people.

It is a fact that the increase in the cost of renting has led to an increase in evictions and an increase in homelessness. Rental precariousness is the single greatest driver of family and childhood homelessness in this country. The motion recognises that households that are already at the margins of society and those who need proper State supports are those that are most badly affected by the increases in the cost of renting. It cannot be overstated the effect this will have on exacerbating inequality. By failing to tackle the cost of renting, we are failing to ensure all people in this country have access to a home and we are only widening these gaps in our society.

Ireland deserves to have true equality, and central to that is economic and housing equality. You cannot do well in school if you do not have access to somewhere secure to sleep and somewhere secure to study. You cannot go to work and get a job if you do not have access to somewhere to wash your clothes and somewhere to be able to sleep and rest. Housing insecurity and housing inequality has a knock-on effect on all other levels of inequality.

I thank the Civil Engagement Group for tabling this motion. The central issue is we need a shift in how we think about housing. It is about shelter. It is about a home. It is not about housing being a commodity.