In Limerick, the average price of a three-bed, semi-detached house is now €345,000. It has gone up 13.8% in a year. It has gone up 40% in five years. This issue of bulk buying by investors is one of the reasons behind house price inflation in Limerick. Some experts say it can account for up to 20%, or one third, of house price inflation. Why did the Government take some action in 2021? It is important to remember that action was taken on foot of what I can only describe as intense political pressure and a really loud and sustained outcry about what happened in Mullen Park in Maynooth, as my colleague, Deputy Cronin, referenced earlier. Despite the restrictions that were introduced then, institutional investors - vulture funds and cuckoo funds - bought €580 million worth of property in the past year. Young people cannot compete with these investor funds. In particular, they cannot compete with cuckoo funds that are going in and buying up second-hand homes, which are generally slightly cheaper homes. I think of somebody who is an ordinary working person and somebody like my sister who is 27 years of age and is a nurse. She has actually emigrated now. I think of people in her peer group who just cannot compete as people who would be able to avail of mortgages with these cuckoo funds, in particular. I support this motion. We need to be clear that when we see investment funds purchasing what should be family homes, we are making the housing crisis worse. We are locking ordinary families out of home ownership and we are driving house prices even higher. We are not helping spiralling prices faced by ordinary renters, which the Bill last week will make even worse. This motion is a reminder that this issue still exists, despite what the Government might claim. In the five years since the previous Government took limited action on this, at least 2,000 homes have been bulk bought by institutional investors. That means hundreds of homes have been taken off the market and hundreds of ordinary, decent, hardworking people have been deprived of the chance to find their first home, start a family and achieve the milestones that would be otherwise considered normal and are often so delayed because of this Government's housing policy. Week after week, we talk about housing. I hear the same thing from the Government constantly. We hear the Government is apparently declaring war on vacancy and dereliction. We hear the Government is introducing measures to incentivise supply while at the same time absolutely screwing renters. What we see are the statistics getting worse. The number of people who are homeless is climbing. House prices are going up. Rents are increasing. When it comes to this issue of institutional investors, maybe we, as a collective, have been too quiet because no ordinary working person can compete with a cuckoo fund. The fact of the mater is the countermotion Government has tabled claims that we have solved this problem. We have not solved this problem because when we introduced the limited measures in 2021 to try to deal with this problem, the figures that were there around the bulk buying of homes were actually half of what they are at the moment. They went up in 2021, 2022 and 2023 and in 2025, they were at twice the level they were at in 2021. That only counts the purchases covered by the higher rate of stamp duty. Those numbers do not tell us about any purchases of up to nine houses at a time. They do not tell us about the apartment blocks where large numbers of homes have been bought by institutional investors, particularly in Dublin. The Minister will come in here and say we need private investment, as he has done. I am not disputing that. The fact of the matter is that the sort of straw man arguments the Government comes in here with on housing will not cut it. We know there needs to be a role for private investment. I recognise that it has a role to play in boosting supply but supply alone will not solve this crisis. The Government will belatedly find that out in years to come. Ordinary families and ordinary working people should not be pitched against sprawling investment funds and German pension funds when trying to purchase their first home. It is wrong. The State must take a radically more active role in the provision of housing. In our manifesto before the previous election, we set out how we wanted to scale up and transition the LDA into a State construction company. We set out the mechanisms by which we wanted to allow ordinary Irish people to invest the sums they have on deposit in social and affordable housing and to give people a return on their savings but also to allow people to invest in a sustainable and a controlled way and a way that has worked in other jurisdictions, such as Austria. What we have with this Government constantly is an approach to housing that puts private developers and institutional investors on a pedestal. They can do no wrong. The fact of the matter is we consistently have public housing targets that are missed year after year. The Government has never met its targets for social and affordable housing. It will not do so this year. We have an approach that is constantly chasing these developers, these institutional investors, including I-RES. Whatever they want, they eventually end up getting. When an intervention fails, we move on. What is quite ironic and quite funny about this countermotion is that, in a weird way, it nearly asks for credit for missing the housing targets. The Government has made much of a deal, or attempted to in the past couple of weeks, about the delivery of the 36,000 but we, on this side of the House, remember the 40,000 homes, the figure that was supposed to be delivered before the election. It is almost as if Government is looking for credit, looking for gratitude and looking for thanks for under-performance and for not delivering on its targets. To be fair to this motion, and to the proposers, it effectively calls on the Government to do something that is already in the programme for Government because it calls on the Government keep the stamp duty surcharges under review to ensure they prohibit bulk purchases but it is clear that the current rate of stamp duty is not doing that. While the Government accepts theoretically, in terms of policy, that there should be no place in the housing market for these kind of bulk buys, surely it can recognise in what is being proposed here that what it is doing is not working and there are still hundreds of these purchases happening every year at twice the rate at which they were when the Government initially introduced the limited restrictions in 2021. It is very disappointing to see the Government's response to this motion in terms of the Minister's countermotion because the response reads like the response to every Private Members' motion on housing in this House. We, on this side of the House, put forward policy proposals and we get stonewalled by Government. I cannot understand why the Government cannot bring itself to accept that the situation as it currently stands in relation to bulk buying is less than perfect when it has nearly said that in the programme for Government. The Minister is playing politics with the countermotion and is trying to convince us that this problem has been solved but it has not been solved. It has not been solved by the Minister's own metrics and it certainly has not been solved for the many thousands of young ordinary working people in this country who have had their dream and their hard-earned ambition towards that realistic aspiration of purchasing a home quashed by one of these institutional investors in terms of a vulture fund or cuckoo fund. If the Government is proud of its record on housing, and if the Minister thinks he is going in the right direction, why not tighten up what the Government did in 2021. If the owner-occupier guarantee is an achievement that the Minister wants to trumpet, why not go further and make it an actual guarantee? I constantly hear Fianna Fáil trumpet that it is, apparently, the party of homeownership but what it is doing here does stack up? We need to see further action on this, we need to go further and we need to be explicit. Investment funds should not be competing with families for family homes and this is another way that Government is failing in terms of housing. While this is not a silver bullet, it is a step we can take to rebalance housing in this country back towards ordinary people.

Sentiment score: -0.05