The thing I find most tiresome about debates on housing and the solutions is that every side presents its proposal as the silver bullet that is somehow going to solve the problem. There is no silver bullet. I do not pretend to know what the answer is. It is something that better minds than mine have grappled with. It is an incredibly complex problem with its roots going back well over a decade. I have some sympathy for this motion. I understand where it is coming from. In 2024, 13,000-odd residential properties were purchased by non-individuals, to put it that way, of which 7,000 were houses and 5,000 were apartments, broadly speaking. It totalled approximately €5 billion in expenditure. No one in this House could endorse a situation where an investor comes in and swamps up all the houses in a particular development, all the apartments in a building or anything like that. That is highly undesirable, particularly when there are people in the local community who want to buy, live and raise families in those houses but are essentially being denied that opportunity. Does placing a blanket ban on investors buying residential homes solve that? I do not believe it does. What is even more unhelpful is having speakers come into this House and, instead of discussing the merits of a motion or exploring whether something might work, decide to use the opportunity to sling political mud at people on the other side of the Chamber. What Deputy O’Flynn, in particular, said was reprehensible. First, he talked about the Galway tent and lumped Fine Gael in with that. Fine Gael had nothing to do with the Galway tent. He then talked about people falsifying the demand for houses. There is no need to falsify the demand for housing in this country. We all know there is enormous demand for housing in this country. He also talked about the closeness between developers and my party. There is no closeness with developers. He seems to have based that on the basis that tax incentives were given to people to come into this country to spend their money here building homes for people. The Deputy mentioned Cherrywood, which is in my constituency. There are not rafts of empty apartments in Cherrywood. There are apartments that are not yet finished, but Cherrywood is mostly made up of homes that are occupied by families. Those are my voters. I talk to those people at their doors and they are delighted to live where they do. I am a renter. I live in an apartment block that is owned by a non-individual. It is owned by a fund. I can tell the House that it is difficult to be a renter. It is expensive. There are no two ways about that. However, you are much better off in this country renting from an institution than from an individual. If we have a problem, we report it and it is fixed that day. If one guy, an individual landlord, owns my apartment, I go to him and he then has to go and find a plumber or electrician or whoever is required to fix the problem. It takes time. I know that because friends of mine who are in that position have shared that experience with me. I remember discussing this issue with a former Minister for finance. I was particularly aggrieved at the fact that if you were an institution or real estate investment trust, REIT, or something similar investing in large residential property schemes in this country, you got a tax incentive to do it. Compare that with a situation where an individual bought an apartment. I am speaking about people who became accidental landlords. Perhaps they bought an apartment just before the crash, got married and had children, and had to move out of the apartment but could not afford to sell it because they were in negative equity, and found themselves in a situation where they were landlords but through no choice of their own. Those people were at a tax disadvantage relative to a large company that came in and set up a REIT here. I felt, and still feel, that is fundamentally unfair. I raised the issue with the Minister for finance of the time. He explained to me why that is there. It was not that he was happy about the idea. The reality was that in the aftermath of the crash, and for a very long time afterwards, there was no building activity in this State. For all the criticism and mud that might be slung at it by the likes of Deputy O'Flynn, when Fine Gael was putting back the economy and trying to get building started again, what we needed, above everything else, was investment. We did not have the means in this country to do the building. We did not have people in this country who could bring large-scale investment to build apartment blocks. By the way, there is nothing wrong with living in an apartment. They are wonderful places to raise families. They are wonderful places to live. I say that from my own experience. They are, however, expensive to build. It is far more expensive per square metre, for example, than a two- or three-storey house to build an apartment block with multiple storeys, lifts and all the other services that go with it. That takes investment. As much as I do not like it, the reality is that the mechanism that was used to get that investment into the country, five or ten years ago, was through those tax incentives. It is not about closeness with developers. Nobody here wants to be handing out money to people who do not deserve it. What we do want to do is to ensure that the people outside the State who have money to spend on construction spend it here, building homes for Irish people, people working here, people living here and people investing in our economy by working in our economy and paying taxes. Those are the people who deserve that development. I do not know if I am right about this or not. I have some sympathy for the aspects of this motion that address the gazumping of local communities and taking away a whole housing estate that has been built and should be made available for sale to people in the local area. I have sympathy in that regard. However, the blanket idea that we would say no one who is not an individual can ever buy or invest in a domestic property in this State is problematic. What it would do is to shut the door on large-scale investors that can spend money here and deliver houses for people who want to live here. Doing that in blanket terms cannot be a good thing. Rather than suggesting there is a silver bullet, let us look at the idea and see if there are parts of it we can take to implement. Let us also not pretend that the Government is not doing its level best to deliver the very thing that we need to do. Let us reflect on the fact that the Government has implemented other policies, such as the 10% tax on people buying large-scale developments. Such things have been done and reflect the desire of the Government to stop this happening and to deliver for individual families in this State wherever we can.

Sentiment score: 0.02