Ba mhaith liom ar dtús mo bhuíochas a ghabháil leis an bPáirtí Sinn Féin as ucht an rún seo a thabhairt faoi bhráid na Dála anocht. Molaim agus molann Páirtí an Lucht Oibre an rún seo. The most basic test of any housing system is really quite simple; it is whether ordinary people can access secure and decent housing. In this country, we have arrived at a situation whereby the country is divided between haves and have-nots. The haves have property and secure housing and the have-nots do not. When the Minister of State, Deputy Cummins, was sitting opposite me, he spoke about 762 eviction notices. He said that we were not to consider the figure in the round but in light of other RTB data. I get all that, but at the same time 762 people got notices of termination in the first couple of months of this year. They are people who have children in school. They work hard and contribute to their communities. They are involved in their GAA clubs and in other activities. They pay their rent on time. They do everything right, yet they received the dreaded notice of termination at the start of this year. The most depressing thing about being having this debate tonight is that it is all fairly predictable. I worry and wonder how bad things must get before the Government takes its head out of the sand and acts. It was repeatedly warned that weakening protections for renters, failing to control rents and relying on an overheated market in the way it has done would make this crisis worse. The consequence of the Government's rental reforms is that eviction notices are up by 51% and disputes with the RTB are up by nearly 18%. New rents average €1,755 a month. Rent is more than €2,200 a month for new renters in Dublin and more than €2,100 in Galway and Limerick. In loads of counties we have had double-digit rent inflation. We have had 12.6% in Limerick and 9.9%, just under 10%, in Galway. The Government can repeat ad nauseam the talking points it has in its countermotion in respect of supply, but the fact of the matter is that homelessness has risen in this country to a level that we have never seen in the history of the State. House prices continue to rise, and all around the country we see young people postponing key life milestones because they cannot secure a stable home. We have couples in their 30s who are back in their childhood bedrooms and families going from homeless hub to homeless hub. Last week, while canvassing in the by-elections, as many Deputies across the House were, I met an individual in the north inner city of Dublin who told me he has been homeless for nearly six years and has moved 78 times during that period. That level of displacement, poverty and insecurity has stuck with me ever since. It is not just that man I met last week, however. People with decent jobs, decent salaries and decent lives are living completely precarious lives because being renters means their lives are built on quicksand. What really depresses me is the way the Government treats skyrocketing rents as necessary but unfortunate, or unfortunate but inevitable. The fact of the matter is, we now accept things that would have been politically unimaginable a decade ago. Time and again, we hear the same mantra about the need to incentivise supply and the need for private sector investment. The Government repeatedly uses this as its reasoning for the rental reforms introduced as part of the rent pressure zones amendment Bill. The type of supply the Government talks about incentivising is a small number of high-yield, expensive, build-to-rent luxury developments. What this means in practice is a small number of expensive apartment developments, maybe in the docklands, Sandyford or Cork, but certainly not in Limerick where there was a 12.6% rent increase, and not in Galway either, where there was a 9.9% increase. The Government is doing nothing to address this. There is no acknowledgment of it in the countermotion. I was enraged when I read the countermotion because it states that "the Government is fully committed to tackling high rents". When I saw that statement, I nearly fell out of my chair. How can the Government put that into a countermotion when it has legislated to allow landlords to put rents in this country through the roof under the market reset element of the legislation, which I begged the Minister to remove during the Committee and Second Stage debates on the rent pressure zones amendment Bill. I even tabled a sensible middle-ground compromise amendment providing for a rent break to moderate the worst of the Bill and to protect renters. On every Stage, I was completely ignored and the legislation was guillotined. For the Government to put into a countermotion that it is "fully committed to tackling high rents" is simply factually incorrect. It is untrue and misleading. The countermotion is not grounded in reality. Elsewhere, it states that "recent reforms to the rental market aim to encourage investment and development, which will encourage the building of new rental apartments, help slow down rent increases and moderate rent levels over time". The rent levels for new build luxury apartments and luxury student accommodation are tied directly to the consumer price index, CPI, and are exempt from the 2% rent cap. That means these newly built apartments enter the market at already over-inflated rents and because they are exempt from the cap, they drive rents even higher. In Dublin, rent consumes about 50% of a worker's after-tax income. In Galway and Limerick, the figures are 45% and 35%, respectively. This Government, through the policy interventions it has taken, is subsidising and sponsoring what I can only describe as a build-to-rent cartel. The Government is either not being honest with people or it genuinely does not understand the cause and effect of what it is doing. I do not know which is more worrying. The policy framework the Government has assumes that lifting rent controls on new properties will fast-track investment into these high-density apartment blocks and enough of them will be built to level off rents and start to bring them down. This is notwithstanding the fact that the apartments can take years to materialise or that they will not materialise in most locations in the country. In addition, while all of this is going on, renters will continue to be crushed by these astronomical rent increases. The Government has gutted the rent pressure zones regime in order to feed this system. It will never be able to feed it enough to satiate it properly and, in the meantime, renters have been thrown to the wolves and the housing and homelessness crisis, the worst in the history of the State, is continuing to break its own records. What depresses me most is that there is a lack of constructive engagement with anyone in opposition on any of these issues. The countermotion, in my view, embodies that because when legislation is tabled, it is voted down on Second Stage if it is Opposition legislation or, if it is a Government Bill, the guillotine is used and it is rammed through. I thought it was interesting that there was no mention of homelessness in the countermotion. The Government has no new measures in relation to homelessness, which is worsening every month, quarter and year. While the countermotion speaks of 2025 and the largest number of new-build social homes constructed since the foundation of the State, it fails to mention that the Government never met its targets under Housing for All, that the in-built housing deficit continues to grow, and that the Government continues to rely on a baseline that is disconnected form the reality of the housing crisis due to the housing deficit. This Government is completely in hock to institutional investors. The institutional investors wanted the market reset rent mechanism, and they got it. They wanted the apartment design changes, and they got them. They wanted subsidies, and they got the VAT cut. Meanwhile, it is renters, young people, homeless people and people in precarious situations who are paying for all of this.

Sentiment score: -0.13