Calls for housing and cost of living movement to force action on rents from ‘weak Government’

The Government can be “pressured and pushed from below” if a cost of living and housing movement, similar to the water charges protests, is established, People Before Profit TD Paul Murphy has said.

Mr Murphy said such a movement can force “concessions out of this Government” and “will at a certain time bring this Government down”.

He was speaking in the Dáil on Wednesday as People Before Profit put forward its Rent Reduction Bill. This would establish a National Rent Authority in order to cap rents at 25 per cent of median household incomes.

Speaking during Leaders’ Questions on Tuesday, Taoiseach Micheál Martin said the legislation would not work and that it was “popular and populist - not implementable”.

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“There would be a complete flood of people out of the market,” he said. “You wouldn’t have a landlord left under your proposal.”

Mr Murphy said that while the Government had won a vote on a motion of confidence on Tuesday evening, he still did not believe “they have the confidence of ordinary people”.

“As the slogan of the Arab Spring goes; what the parliament does, the streets can undo,” the Dublin South-West TD said.

“This is now a weak Government. It is a Government that can be pressured and pushed from below if we manage to build a cost of living and housing movement, like we did with the water charges.

“Such a movement, which has a protest at 5pm in front of the Dáil today, and a major national protest on Saturday, September 24th, can force concessions out of this Government and will at a certain time bring this Government down and open the possibility of a Government that does not govern in the interests of the big corporate landlords, but instead in the interests of ordinary renters.”

‘Absolutely obscene’

People Before Profit TD Richard Boyd Barrett said average national rents were now in excess of €1,500 per month and that a person would need €17,000 a year “just to pay your rent”.

“The picture gets far, far worse when you’re looking at Dublin, where the average rent is now €2,000; that’s €24,000 in after tax income required just to pay the rent. That is more than 50 per cent of national median household income,” he said.

The Dún Laoghaire TD said in his constituency the situation was “even worse”, where average rents in the last six months were €2,600, which he described as “absolutely obscene”.

“This is totally unsustainable and of course the consequences we can see with the homeless figures rising week on week and the big feature of the surge in homelessness that we’re seeing at the moment, in almost all of the cases that I’m dealing with, is these are people who are working that are being made homeless,” he added.

“People in a household working and they still can’t afford the rents out there. In many cases, they’re not eligible for social housing support, because this Government and previous governments for 10 years now have refused to raise the income eligibility thresholds in what is clearly a deliberate strategy to make it look as if there’s less people in need of social housing support, when in fact, it is self evident there’s more people than ever before who need social housing support.”

Minister of State at the Department of Housing Peter Burke said the Government would be opposing the Bill as it would “likely have a severely detrimental effect on the supply of much needed rental property”. He accused People Before Profit of being “focused on sound bites” and putting forward “no solutions”.