While most people are handing over more and more of their wages in rent and mortgage payments, other people are making an absolute fortune out of the misery of the housing crisis. For those people, this is not a crisis; this is a cash cow. For the banks, corporate landlords, investment funds and large developers, the housing crisis is not something to fix; it is something to feed off. It is something to keep alive at all costs. Those powerful interests want to squeeze every drop out of ordinary workers and this legislation is proof positive of that fact. The Government are the middle men for the vested interests. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael's rent hike Bill will allow vulture funds and big landlords to hike up rents to over 60,000 people every year. This will mean people paying thousands of euro more in rent from 1 March. This Bill is about increasing rents - plain and simply. Everything else is window dressing and Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael and their band of Independents know this. They are making sure that the gravy train stays on the tracks and that the money keeps flowing upwards. This is the second time in the past few months that the Government has reached into the pockets of ordinary people to give more money to those profiting from the crisis. It handed out massive tax cuts to developers for apartments that were being built. We are talking about hundreds of millions of euro that should have been given back to workers. Instead, the Government shoved it into the pockets of developers. The largest developers are currently boasting gross profit margins of over 20%. Even after all their executive salaries and all their bonuses, they still absolutely smashed their profit targets and the Government gave them more tax cuts. When workers look at their payslips and wonder how they are going to make it stretch and how they are going to afford the rent, they should know that tax cuts that should have been theirs ended up in the pockets of developers and landlords. The Government does not stop there. It is not just about jacking up rents or handing out millions of euro of tax breaks; it is also making renters live in smaller and darker apartments. The Government wants corporate landlords to be able to charge thousands of euro a month for apartments that are just bigger than two car parking spaces. It is glaringly obvious whose side the Government is on. We do not have to look too hard to find out that it is on the side of the big landlords, the developers who were handed the tax breaks, the landlords that are getting bigger tax breaks, the investors that pay no tax at all on their rental income and the banks that do not pay a penny tax, but renters, by God, are the ones that are going to have to pay under the legislation because the Government thinks that they need to pay more. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are never going to solve the housing crisis because they are on the side of those people getting rich off the backs of hard-pressed people - plain and simple. The only way to fix this housing crisis is to take on the vested interests, to invest in public housing and not to keep on bowing down to those same vested interests. We need to end this rip-off for once and for all. We need to ban rent increases. That is the legislation that the Minister should be bringing before this House - legislation that Deputy Ó Broin has drafted. The Minister should be making sure that rents are affordable. That is the legislation that he should be bringing before the House, not this shameful legislation that will jack up rents on tens of thousands of households right across this State every single year from 1 March onwards. This rent hike Bill needs to be stopped in its tracks.

Sentiment score: 0.02