Frances Black (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State to the House. I am very glad to be here to speak on this Private Members' motion brought forward by Sinn Féin. We all know, and have to face, the reality that housing is the biggest disaster in Ireland right now. Failure in housing is having a spillover effect, which is impacting our ability to retain trained teachers, nurses, doctors and those in the mental health area all over the country, but particularly in Dublin. I am a member of the health committee and that is what we are hearing all the time. The health sector cannot get staff because there is no housing. We are in crisis. This leads to more crowding and worse schools and hospitals. The ripple effect is ongoing.

The publication of the report from the Housing Commission is very welcome. The clear takeaway is that the housing crisis is a systemic failure that has emerged from a fundamentally broken way of thinking that really needs radical change. I am disappointed with the Government's countermotion. I am starting to believe that the only people who have confidence in the Government's housing policy are the landlords, the developers and the speculators who are profiting from all of this. When you think of the homeless people, people trying to raise children in hotel rooms, the refugees sleeping rough and having their tents destroyed by the Government - an action which is off the Richter scale - and the young people paying rip-off rents or stuck in their childhood bedrooms, they just do not have faith in this Government's ability to fix this crisis at this time.

A recent investor report found that Ireland provides the highest rental yield in Europe. Those bumper profits for corporate landlords and institutional investors are coming at the expense of ordinary people who just want a roof over their heads, so that they can live their lives and raise their families in safety and security. It is not much to ask.

The Housing Commission report emphasises the importance of expanding the delivery of cost-rental housing units as a means of providing affordable housing going forward. I agree with this but I raise the unaffordability of cost-rental units. These units are welcome but to qualify, people often must earn above a median income. A rental market that is only affordable for people with an above-median income is dysfunctional.

The Government's use of the term "cost rental" is different from the internationally lauded Vienna model. Irish cost-rental units are defined as being 25% below market rents in their area. In Vienna, rent for cost-rental tenants is calculated as a percentage of their income like the differential income system used in local authority housing in Ireland. As cost-rental housing is plentiful and high quality with generous eligibility criteria in the Vienna model, cost-rental schemes have socially mixed tenants and the higher earners subsidise the lower earning ones, providing enough rental income to keep the buildings in great condition and making them attractive places to live. Social housing and cost rental are separate systems here and both are worse as a result. If the Government raised the income thresholds for social housing and massively increased supply through the establishment of a State construction company. It would create socially-mixed communities of people paying affordable, sustainable rents.

I am glad the Housing Commission's report has outlined the exponential increase in HAP tenancies and has called for the HAP scheme to be used on a short-term basis only. The HAP scheme is being administrated in a manner which attempts to mitigate the worst impacts in the housing crisis on low-income households in the immediate term, without contributing to a longer-term solution. HAP is given in lieu of social housing support which could provide real stability and comfort. Most HAP recipients have to top up their payments. The median top-up is over €200 a month and it means that people in HAP tenancies are worse off than social housing tenants paying differential rent that is scaled to their income to ensure affordability. People in receipt of HAP are being failed by the State which refuses to make the investments and policy reforms necessary to provide adequate public services or proper regulation of the housing market. HAP is an upward transfer of wealth from all taxpayers to those with the wealth to purchase rental property. The report points out that HAP is also contributing to the inflation of rents as lower-income HAP recipients who should be supported through the provision of social housing are made to compete with middle-income tenants in the private sector.

The Government unfortunately refuses to listen to the experts when it says that measures like HAP or the help to buy scheme are inflationary giveaways to landlords and developers. Free-market orthodoxy is winning out over common sense and expertise. I have said this before in this Chamber but I grew up in Charlemont Street tenements and as a child I remember friends and neighbours moving to the newly-built local authority developments built by Fianna Fáil. The social housing that was developed in the post-war era in Ireland was socially and economically transformative. It really represented the efforts of the State to lift its people up out of the poverty and backwardness that was imposed on us by a colonising power. That vision has now been lost.

To solve this housing crisis, we require a new way of thinking. We need a mandate for the kind of progressive change we desperately need. Therefore, I am very happy today to support this motion.