2026-02-17

I move that: That Dáil Éireann: notes that: — the housing crisis continues to deepen for ordinary workers and families while corporate landlords, investors and developers make ever greater profits; — residential property prices have increased by 47.7 per cent since 2020, pushing first-time buyers further into debt to secure a home, while locking many out of home ownership; — high rents and residential property prices are making it increasingly difficult for workers and families to purchase and own their own home, leading to the collapse of homeownership; — investment funds bulk purchasing homes takes homes away from ordinary workers and families, and drives up prices; — despite the commitments by Government to end the practice, investment funds have continued to bulk purchase homes; — the Government re-committed to prohibiting the bulk purchase of homes in the Programme for Government; and — despite repeated promises to address the issue of homes being bulk purchased by vulture funds, the Government continues to allow the practice; further notes that: — Sinn Féin have repeatedly called for investment funds to not be allowed bulk purchase homes; — the Government was warned by Sinn Féin that belated measures introduced in May 2021, and the adjustment in Budget 2025, would be insufficient to end this unacceptable practice; — the Government are responsible for the continued bulk purchase by investment funds, with over 2,000 houses purchased by investment funds triggering the higher rate of stamp duty between May 2021 and the end of 2025, at the expense of individual home buyers; and — this only captures a fraction of the homes being bought by vulture funds, who continue to be able to buy up to nine houses at a time without even having to pay the higher stamp duty rate, and face no restrictions on the purchase of apartments; concludes that the Government, comprising Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil and the Government Independents, are prioritising the interests of developers, landlords and investment funds, at the expense of struggling workers and families; and calls on the Government to ban investment funds from buying family homes. Vulture funds were invited into this country by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael and they then dusted down the red carpet for them. They were invited in to snap up homes on the cheap that should have gone to workers and families. Fine Gael rolled out that red carpet and has been waiting on them hand and foot ever since. That is the reality. Sinn Féin's motion is a straightforward proposal. Indeed, it is asking the Government to keep its word. It simply puts the needs of workers and families ahead of the faceless vulture funds. We are calling for a ban on these funds snapping up family homes. That is it. It is as simple as that. End this practice. That this Government has failed to do this when we are this far into a housing crisis is absolutely shameful. Ordinary workers and families right across the State have no chance competing with these funds. They hoover up homes and they drive up prices. People have watched as house prices have gone out of control under the Government's watch. They have gone up 50% in five years. People are desperate. They know they cannot keep up. No matter how hard they work or how much they save, the hope of ever owning their own home keeps being ripped away from them. When these vultures snapped up a housing estate in County Kildare back in 2021, people's blood was boiling. It was that anger that forced the Government's hand. I know this because for years before that, I was tabling amendments calling on the Government to act. I tabled amendment after amendment to finance Bills, and Minister after Minister, in Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, rallied against them and voted against them time and time again. Let us be honest: even when the Government's hands were finally forced, it did as little as it could get away with. It was just enough to look like it was doing something about it. All the while, it was letting vulture funds snap up homes left, right and centre. The proof is there for everybody to see. Over 2,000 homes have been bulk purchased since the Government said it would stop it. The programme for Government again committed to ending this scandal. It is one thing that the Government said it would do, the one small measure it said it would take in its programme for Government, and it did not even deliver on this basic issue. When Deputy Simon Harris was Taoiseach, he said vulture funds buying up homes "cannot be tolerated". Those are his words. He wrote to the then Minister for Finance calling on him to intervene. He called on him to stand up for first-time buyers but it was all for show. It was all so he could leak it to the media and make it look as if he was doing something about it. Deputy Harris, though, is now the Minister for Finance and vulture funds are still buying up family homes. The only difference is that he has no one to write his letters to anymore. There is no one else to blame because this is happening on his watch, and far from not tolerating it, he is supporting it.

Hear, hear.

Let us have it straight. Let us talk about the facts here. I mentioned that 2,000 homes had been purchased by vulture funds over the past number of years. That is only the tip of the iceberg, however, because, as we know, vulture funds do not have to register up to ten homes that they purchase in any given year. Thousands and thousands of homes are being snatched up by vulture funds, big landlords and other companies. Most of them are second-hand homes. People are sick to the back teeth of this nonsense, and the Government will peddle it out again, that we need to attract more international capital. Nobody objects on this side of the House to international investment in the construction of houses and apartments. What we do have an objection to, what we do call out and what we say needs to stop is vulture funds swooping in at the last minute, buying up homes and driving up prices. Will the Minister explain to me why we need investment funds buying second-hand homes. How does this deliver more housing supply? The answer is that it does not. It just drives up prices, plain and simple. Home ownership is collapsing under Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. It is being sold off. I made this point many years ago when the Government introduced the fake measure that it said would ban vulture funds from buying up family homes. I said what it had done was to hang the white flag of surrender over the capital city of Dublin and other cities across this State.

Hear, hear.

What the Government has done is that it has sold Ireland. Not only has it sold Ireland, it has sold out its people. I ask it to do the right thing today. I ask it to live up to the commitment it gave and to the words in the programme for Government, which state that it will make sure this is stopped. How can the Government tolerate this? Last year, there were 293 homes alone, and many more unregistered because of the other loopholes it has added in. The motion is simple. We call on every Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael Deputy, and, indeed, the Independent Deputies who back them. Whose side are they on? Are they on the side of the vultures or they on the side of ordinary, decent Irish families trying to put a roof over their heads?

Hear, hear.

I was contacted by a lady this week. Her relationship broke down and she lost her job. She said: "I’m left there working 2 jobs while taking care of my 4yo full time and will have to resort to homelessness if I don’t get help." She does not get any tax breaks, yet the vulture funds, based abroad, come in here and buy up second-hand homes. They then go to rent a home back to this woman at huge rents she cannot even afford. She is working two jobs to try to keep a roof over her and her child's head. She pays tax on the income from both of those jobs, but the vulture funds the Government let in here go tax-free on the money that lady is giving them. How can that be right? Another woman contacted me. Herself, her partner and her two kids are living in a room in her parents' house. They got a mortgage, but the mortgage is not enough to buy a house. She said they applied for a mortgage, got it and it would not even buy them a shed. They did everything right and look where it got them. They worked hard. They have jobs. They tried to do everything right. It was the same last week with the new rental Bill. The Government has a fascination with vulture funds, investment funds and cuckoo funds, but what about ordinary people? Does the Minister know what is happening? I looked at Daft.ie today. I challenge the Minister to go online and look at it. A house in my area, in Farranree, was on sale for €225,000. Does the Minister know what it sold for? A house in a working-class estate of old council houses that are 75 or 80 years old sold for €320,000, or €95,000 more than the original asking price. The Government is getting ordinary people who are trying to buy a house into bidding wars against vulture funds. It is not right; it is all wrong. We know people have a limited amount of money, but these vulture funds have no limits. They can do what they want. They can outbid anyone. I will finish off with this. In my constituency of Cork North Central, from the north side all the way down to Glanmire, one in every ten houses is bought by non-owner-occupiers.

Hear, hear.

In 2021, the acquisition of 112 homes in Hollystown, Dublin 15, by an investment fund rightly caused anger across the State. These houses - the ones the Minister talks about all the time as being essential to help young families to get a family home - were bought up in bulk by an investor. They are now rented out for at least €2,600 per month. Simon Harris has publicly stated that the bulk purchasing of homes needed for first-time buyers cannot be tolerated. That is on the record. Department of Finance figures state that by the end of 2025, over 2,000 homes have been bulk purchased since the Government first brought in measures it said would end the practice. Simon Harris is not only the Tánaiste; he is also the Minister for Finance. He can change this in the morning if he is really serious about this not being tolerated. The fact is that family homes are still being bought up in bulk despite the Minister's attempts to portray that the Government is doing something to end this practice. What chance have workers and first-time buyers got to buy a house for themselves and their families? It is as clear as day that the Government's policies have failed and the repeated promises to stop investment funds bulk purchasing family homes have failed. Properties are being snatched up from under the noses of ordinary workers and families who are struggling to put a roof over their heads. This Government's inaction is allowing these vulture funds to drive up house prices and profits further by renting out these houses to the same people they outbid at extortionate rates because they cannot find anywhere to live. The people want the right to buy their own home, which is a right that generations have had. That is being made more difficult by vulture funds. The motion is clear: we must end bulk buying of family homes by vulture funds. The Minister can do that in the morning if he wants to.

Hear, hear.

If you tried to create a housing crisis, you could not do a better job than this Government is doing. It has allowed investor funds to come in and purchase family homes - ordinary homes - from under the feet of families who need them. Big corporations and big multinationals are coming in to make money while families are looking for a roof over their heads and for their own homes. The Government has created a situation where house prices have increased by 50% in the last five years. We have record homelessness. We have sky-high rents that are outside the availability and affordability of the vast majority of people. Evictions and notices to quit are on the up. While that is happening, the Government has ripped supports from families, such as the tenant in situ scheme, which it has gutted and turned down to a trickle. It has scrapped the eviction ban, and it has not reached its own social and affordable housing targets. I met six families last week who have notices to quit. I am meeting one of them on Thursday. It was a couple who were a Waterford local radio station today, and I was asked to meet them. What am I to tell those families? When I meet them, they are absolutely in despair. There are no houses for them to rent and certainly not within their means. They are all corralled into the private rental sector, trying to get homes that do not exist. They have not a hope of getting a social house and they are facing homelessness. They are facing eviction. These are families with children. I have to say I do not believe that this Government really cares about them because the Minister must be meeting the same families. He has to be meeting the same families with the same experience and the same circumstances as the families I am meeting. They are under fierce pressure, and they have been watching on aghast as these investor funds come in, buy up homes and make huge profits. Now, to really add insult to injury, the Government is going to bring in a rip-off rent Bill that will force up rents even more. In Waterford, rents are going to go up by €4,000. The Minister needs to get a grip and start representing ordinary Irish people, workers and families and not the big investor funds and big landlords, which the Government is doing.

Hear, hear.

The message is very clear here. We need the Minister to ban investment funds from buying family homes. There are many things that investment funds can invest in and buy, but not family homes. The Minister has the power to change that. Young people and working families are being forced out of the market by vulture funds with unlimited reserves that are outbidding them not just of homes, but of their futures. My colleagues and I on these benches have been highlighting this scandal for years. I remember doing it when I was in the local authority. I thank Deputy Doherty for bringing this motion forward this evening and for all the work he has done in this area. Since the higher stamp duty rate was first introduced in 2021, over 2,000 homes have been bulk purchased, hoovered up and taken off the market. Taking these homes from people who desperately need them is thievery in plain sight. In one of my offices alone, in the last week there have been 15 notices to quit. That is just in a few days. Investment funds should not be permitted to bulk buy family homes full stop. Homes are for living in, not for speculating, stockpiling and squeezing profit out of hard-working people. Across Mayo, I am hearing the real-life consequences of allowing vulture funds to outbid ordinary couples. They are bulk buying homes that should be available to young people who are hoping to start their lives and families together. Any home snapped up by a vulture fund is one less home for a nurse, teacher or young couple saving desperately for a deposit. It reduces supply, increases competition and, inevitably, drives prices up, which are up 47.7% since 2020. Young people are being priced out of their own communities. The result is soaring house prices and extortionate rents that are in no way a reflection of local incomes. I know families facing no-fault evictions. As I said, it is happening everywhere across Mayo. Rental properties are scarce and unaffordable.

Hear, hear.

In less than five years, house prices have risen by 47.7%. That is a failure of the Government of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. It is a failure to respond, a failure to intervene and a failure to deliver. Over 2,000 family homes, which is a conservative estimate, have been bulk purchased by investment funds since the Minister's claim they had stopped it. In Waterford today, there is not a single housing assistance payment, HAP, property to rent. House prices are up 10.7% in Waterford across city and country. The average price for a three-bedroom semi-detached house is €345,000. Families are being squeezed out of their own communities, while funds expand their portfolios. Méadaíodh praghsanna na dtithe beagnach 50% ó 2020. Tá na mílte tithe ceannaithe ag coistí infheistíochta. I bPort Láirge, níl aon teach HAP ar fáil agus is rogha polaitiúil é sin. Tá an Rialtas ag seasamh leis na coistí in ionad na dteaghlach. Caithfear cosc iomlán a chur ar choistí infheistíochta ag ceannach thithe teaghlaigh. Homes are for living in. They are not asset portfolios. While a young couple in Waterford saves every cent for a deposit, vulture and investment funds can buy nine houses without even triggering the higher stamp duty rate. While families search in vain for a rental, entire estates are snapped up and rented back at inflated prices. This Government is choosing funds over families and people know it. The Government needs to wake up and take action. It needs to ban the bulk purchase of homes. Simon Harris once wrote that bulk purchasing of homes could not be tolerated. Now, as Tánaiste and Minister for Finance, no less, it is happening on his watch. This is about power and priorities. Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil and the Lowry and Healy-Rae Independents are protecting their vested interests and we on this side of the House are standing with workers and families. The Minister needs to take action now and ban the bulk purchase of homes.

I want to express my thanks to an Teachta Doherty for proposing this Private Members' motion and for all the work he has done in this space. While the Minister and his best buds in Fine Gael were rolling out the red carpet, at least there were people on the Opposition benches shouting "Stop". I feel so sorry for young people. I genuinely worry for them that they are starting to lose hope, and all the while, they are literally being gaslit by this Government. The Government has made it very comfortable for these investment funds, vulture funds or whatever word we want to put on it. Fine Gael invited them in and Fianna Fáil took out the hoover and cleaned the red carpet and made sure they felt every bit as welcome. A total of 2,000 homes have been snapped up by these vulture funds since the Government said it would stop the practice. The Government committed to this and yet still it happens. It is a little bit like the Minister's war on dereliction. It is really hard to see it as anything other than empty rhetoric. Last weekend I spoke to a woman who lives in Rush in my constituency. She has three grown-up children, all of whom are teachers and all of whom work abroad. They are absolutely desperate to come home and she is absolutely sick of only seeing her grandchildren on Skype. Her adult children want to come home but they are competing with these vulture funds. They are working hard but the odds are stacked against them because of Government policy. Rents in my constituency are on average €2,300 per month. Her kids cannot come home to rent because they will never ever be able to save for a deposit, paying the sky-high rents that are now Government policy. They cannot come home to buy because they cannot compete with vulture funds. Investment funds are buying family homes. Our young people do not have a chance. When the Government says it wants to ban a practice, it sometimes forgets that it is the Government and could just ban it. It could stop it happening but it does not do so.

I thank my colleague, Deputy Doherty, for tabling the motion. The housing crisis continues to deepen for ordinary workers, families and children. We have children growing up in emergency accommodation and in overcrowded homes while their parents are being outbid for homes by vulture funds. Despite repeated promises to address this issue, the Government continues to allow this practice, meaning those struggling to buy a home have their hopes of owning a home taken away by vulture funds that can buy up to ten houses at a time without even having to pay the higher stamp duty rate and face no restrictions on the purchase of apartments. They can buy ten homes at once while a family cannot even secure one. I ask the Minister to tell me how he can face these families and tell them is doing all he can when they can see with their own eyes that house prices have risen and the number of houses for sale in their price bracket is decreasing. High rents are making it almost impossible for people even to save for a deposit. The Minister is asking people to run a race while he is tying weights to their ankles. In Clare in late 2024 the residential property price register showed the average price paid by new homeowners in Shannon and Ennis jumped by more than €40,000 in a single year. This is not a market functioning for the people; it is market rigged in favour of big investors. Homes are for living in and not for hoarding or for vulture funds circling communities and snapping up family homes in bulk while young couples stand helpless at the gate. The Minister has the opportunity now to ban vulture funds from snapping up family homes. He has the opportunity to level the playing field and give those families hope. I hope he does it and, more importantly, those families hope he does it.

I move amendment No. 1: To delete all words after "Dáil Éireann" and substitute the following: acknowledges that: — the new housing plan 'Delivering Homes, Building Communities 2025-2030: An Action Plan on Housing Supply and Targeting Homelessness', is focussed on putting in place the conditions to enable delivery of a minimum of 300,000 new homes between 2025 and 2030; — the plan includes a commitment to deliver 72,000 social homes, and provide 90,000 affordable supports, to help people secure a home of their own; — it seeks to significantly accelerate delivery of new homes by focusing on activating land and creating the optimal environment to encourage housing activity, including regulatory reform, tax incentives and the largest ever capital investment in the history of the State, with €275 billion invested in infrastructure over 10 years, through the National Development Plan; — to accelerate future supply, Budget 2026 included a suite of taxation measures aimed at stimulating the supply of new apartments, including a reduced Value Added Tax (VAT) rate and an enhanced Corporation Tax deduction for apartment construction costs; — the revised National Planning Framework, published in April 2025, is a major step forward in this regard, and will help increase capacity and accelerate home building across the country; — over the last five years, almost 149,000 new homes have been delivered, which compares with 83,267 in the previous five-year period, and just 29,217 in the five years before that; — a total of 36,284 new dwellings were completed in 2025, an increase of 20 per cent year-on-year; — the unprecedented level of investment that Government has committed will bring about a very significant scale-up in the delivery of housing over the coming years, address the needs of the most vulnerable in our communities, make buying and renting homes more affordable, and support the development of villages, towns and cities across the country; and — the delivery of 300,000 homes by 2030 will, however, require an estimated €20 billion in development finance each year, a significant portion of which will need to come from investment by the private sector, to support home ownership and a well-functioning private rental market; recognises that: — Government has implemented several measures in recent years, including an 'owner occupier guarantee' and stamp duty measures, to ensure a balanced housing market across all tenures, including home ownership, social housing and private rental; — the issuing in 2021, of the Section 28 Guidelines for planning authorities on the Regulation of Commercial Institutional Investment in Housing, aims to restrict the practice of multiple housing and duplex units being sold to a single buyer, and these guidelines ensure that new 'own-door' houses and duplex units in lower-density housing developments can no longer be bulk-purchased by institutional investors in a manner that causes the displacement of individual purchasers or social and affordable housing, including cost-rental; — these guidelines, setting out the 'owner-occupier' guarantee, also ensure that 'home ownership' is included as a specific tenure type within a local authority's housing strategy; — in May 2021, as an additional measure to tackle the bulk acquisition of new houses, a Stamp Duty rate of 10 per cent was introduced, where 10 or more houses were acquired in any 12 month period, and in 2025, this rate was increased to 15 per cent; — these measures have succeeded in preventing the inappropriate bulk purchase of a very significant number of homes, and securing those homes for purchase by homeowners; — as of Q4 2025, since May 2021, a total estimate of 63,962 houses and duplex units received planning permission, with conditions restricting the bulk purchasing or multiple sales to a single purchaser; — based on provisional data from the Revenue Commissioners, bulk purchased homes are reducing year-on-year since 2023, and in 2025, 293 homes were bulk purchased, down from 675 in 2023; — the Programme for Government commits to maintaining the 'owner occupier guarantee', thereby continuing to prohibit the inappropriate bulk purchase of homes, and securing homes for homeownership; — the measures outlined are having the desired effect regarding family homes, and the Government has rightly not applied those to apartments, as it recognises the positive role institutional investment needs to play in developing apartment supply as set out in the Delivering Homes, Building Communities housing plan; and — Budget 2026 included a suite of taxation measures aimed at stimulating the supply of new apartments, including a reduced VAT rate on new apartments, and an enhanced Corporation Tax deduction for apartment construction costs; and affirms Government efforts to: — continue to bring forward measures that will increase the supply of new homes across all tenures, to make sure that everyone has a range of housing options available to them, whether they want to buy a house, rent one, or are in need of social housing; — adequately resource the Land Development Agency (LDA), to deliver an increased quantum of new homes, noting Government already recently increased resourcing to the agency; — diversify sources of investment, noting the level of investment required in the long term cannot be solely the responsibility of the State, and it will also require a very significant level of private investment, including appropriate institutional capital investment, essential for the delivery of critically needed private rented stock; — prioritise infrastructure development as critical means for increasing housing supply, noting the establishment of the Housing Activation Office and the new Infrastructure Investment Fund, to coordinate homebuilding and investment in the servicing of zoned lands; — expand the capacity of the construction sector as another key measure to scale-up delivery to the levels necessary by 2030, and thereafter building on ongoing measures to tackle barriers in construction careers, promote career opportunities, and make construction more attractive to women; — build on the significant number of social and affordable homes provided in 2025, expanding State investment, supplemented by LDA investment and Housing Finance Agency lending; — ensure that Home Building Finance Ireland has the capacity and flexibility to continue to respond to funding gaps, and support increased housing delivery nationwide; — improve equity availability for homebuilding through the Ireland Strategic Investment Fund's new €600 million equity programme, in partnership with the national banks; — boost homeownership, and help support younger people seeking autonomy in the housing market, through measures like the First Home Scheme, Help-to-Buy Scheme, and the Local Authority Home Loan Scheme; and — tackle homelessness through a suite of cross-Government responses, acknowledging that homelessness is a complex issue, requiring multifaceted responses to deal with varying causal factors and family circumstances. I thank the Sinn Féin Deputies for tabling the motion before the House, which relates to investment funds purchasing family homes. I welcome the opportunity to respond to the motion. While the Government cannot support the motion, I welcome the opportunity to set out the Government's clear and robust position on the issues the motion raises and to table a countermotion. Housing, in both supply and affordability, is a defining social and economic challenge of this country, although certainly not of Ireland alone. Tackling the housing crisis is my absolute priority as Minister, and there should be no doubt about that in the House. Housing is the single greatest pressure facing families and working people who aspire to a secure home of their own. I spoke to advocacy organisation Threshold just yesterday evening about its latest rental survey covering the island of Ireland, which reflects these concerns and fears among people in the Republic and in the North. It is in housing where the Government is mobilising the most significant resources in the history of the State. We recognise the frustration that exists with housing as it is now for people and for their families. We recognise the strain being caused by rising prices and rents. We recognise the anxiety of those who have not purchased a home yet as they save and save for a mortgage, and who fear that owning a home may be some way away. The dignity of having your own door, be it through social housing, affordable housing supports from the Government, cost rental or private purchase, is essential. As Minister, I want to ensure people have a safe and secure home to grow up in and to grow old in. In this vein it is simply not credible to suggest that the Government has stood idly by. We are not indifferent to the impact of bulk purchasing. The facts demonstrate that sustained, practical and effective action has been taken. The Government's approach is to significantly restrict bulk purchasing. In effect, as we will outline today, we are disincentivising bulk purchasing in favour of individual private homeownership. In 2021, the section 28 planning guidelines were introduced to regulate commercial institutional investment in housing. These guidelines ensure that new own-door houses and what are called duplex units in lower-density developments cannot be bulk purchased in a way that displaces individual buyers or social and affordable housing. This is essential. Since May 2021, planning permissions covering 63,962 houses and duplex units have included conditions restricting bulk purchasing or multiple sales to a single purchaser. In addition, we introduced a higher rate of stamp duty where ten or more houses are acquired within a 12-month period. This rate was increased to 15% in budget 2025. These measures have materially changed market behaviour and have secured thousands of homes for individual purchasers rather than institutional investors. It is important, in the context of this debate, to focus on the evidence. The combined effect of these policies is now clearly visible in the data. Revenue's provisional figures show that 675 properties were subject to the higher stamp duty rate in 2023, falling to 396 in 2024 and further to 293 in 2025, with the total value of such acquisitions declining sharply over the same period, from €266.1 million in 2023 to approximately €88.3 million in 2025. In other words, since these strengthened measures took effect, the number of homes being bulk acquired has fallen year on year, and this is welcome. Crucially, Central Statistics Office data shows that institutional investors have become net sellers of houses, selling more homes than they purchased in 2024. These trends, borne out by independent national statistics, demonstrate that the policy interventions introduced by the Government are having the intended effect. We have also committed in our programme for Government to maintaining the owner-occupier guarantee. This commitment stands. We set out a clear policy view in our new national housing action plan, Delivering Homes, Building Communities, when it was launched last November. We acknowledged that even with the largest housing budget in the history of the State providing unprecedented levels of investment in housing, the Government cannot fund all of the approximately €20 billion per annum of development finance needed. The majority of the additional finance needed will be sourced from private sources. It is imperative that private capital is attracted into home building across the country, and this includes from international sources. The attraction of sustainable capital will support our aims to provide more homes and ensure a well-functioning private market, in tandem with driving forward on our social and affordable programmes. Our new housing plan, Delivering Homes, Building Communities, is building on the strongest period of housing delivery in a generation. Over the past five years almost 149,000 new homes have been delivered. This represents a step change in output on previous years. The new plan is ambitious. It commits to delivering 300,000 new homes over its lifetime, including 72,000 new social homes and 90,000 affordable housing supports to help people to buy or rent at a cost they can sustain. Let me be very clear that these figures are not a ceiling. If we can exceed them, we will, because increasing supply is the single most important lever we have to moderate prices, improve affordability, reduce homelessness and increase homeownership for families and ordinary working people. The plan rests on two core pillars: activating supply and supporting people. The first pillar, activating supply, is about removing the structural barriers that constrain housing output. It is about unlocking land, reforming and accelerating planning, investing in water, energy and transport infrastructure, and addressing viability challenges so that homes can be built where they are needed. At the same time, we are expanding construction capacity through apprenticeships and modern methods of construction, and bringing vacant and derelict homes back into use through grants and a new derelict property tax. The second pillar, supporting people, recognises that supply alone is not enough. We must ensure that those most impacted by the housing crisis are supported directly and effectively. Homelessness remains the most urgent social challenge we face. It is at levels that I find unacceptable. Any level of homelessness is unacceptable. We are developing a focused child and family homelessness action plan to prevent families from entering homelessness in the first place. That is why we are expanding Housing First to provide more than 2,000 wraparound tenancies. For older people, disabled people and those with access needs, we are implementing the national housing strategy for disabled people and increasing funding under the housing adaptation grant. For our Traveller community, we are continuing investment in high-quality Traveller-specific accommodation. An inclusive housing system must meet the needs of every member of society. I know this is fundamental to cohesiveness throughout Ireland. Over the lifetime of the action plan, we will deliver an average of 12,000 new social homes each year. That is an unprecedented commitment. In parallel, we will provide an average of 15,000 affordable housing supports annually through the starter homes programme and related initiatives. The help to buy scheme and the first home scheme continue to bridge the gap for first-time buyers struggling with deposits and mortgage limits. These schemes are not abstract policy instruments; they are enabling thousands of households to purchase their first home. The rental market must also function effectively. We are introducing national rent controls and reforming the rent pressure zone system to balance tenant protection with the need to maintain investment in new rental supply. We are strengthening tenant protections in legislation, enhancing the powers of the Residential Tenancies Board, publishing a rent price register and increasing regulation of the short-term letting sector. A stable and predictable rental framework is essential. Without it, supply will contract further and renters will suffer the consequences. Progress is being made. Completions are rising. Social and affordable output is at record levels. Planning reforms are accelerating. Infrastructure investment is being aligned with housing growth. However, we are honest about the scale of the task. There is no single measure. There is no simple ban that will solve the challenges we face. The Government's approach is clear: increase supply at scale, protect and prioritise home ownership, deliver record levels of social and affordable housing, prevent the inappropriate bulk purchasing of family homes, strengthen tenant protections; and mobilise both public and private investment to build the homes our growing population requires. Delivering Homes, Building Communities is a funded, actionable plan. It recognises that solving the housing crisis demands persistence, partnership and pragmatism. We will continue to act where measures need to be strengthened and we will continue to drive delivery, because the only sustainable answer to the challenges we face is more homes. That is what the new housing plan will deliver.

Back in January 2024, the vultures swooped in and bought up 46 of 54 family homes at Belcamp Manor in Dublin Bay North. The then Taoiseach, Simon Harris, wrote to the finance Minister saying that the bulk purchasing of family homes cannot be tolerated. However, it has continued, except now it is happening on the Minister for Finance, Simon Harris's, watch. The investment funds snapping up these homes are now renting them back at eye-watering prices. Some of these funds are not paying any tax on that rent because they are based outside the State. The higher stamp duty that Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael eventually brought in to curb the bulk purchasing has not worked. How does the Minister expect ordinary workers and families to compete with these funds? His Government promised it would tackle this problem head-on. It promised to do all it could to make housing affordable for hard-working people. How much longer is the Government going to stand by and allow faceless companies to compete and rip off Irish families and workers? I plead with the Minister not to add this to his already long list of broken promises. It is time to ban investor funds from snapping up family homes once and for all.

Hear, hear.

When big funds enter residential markets with deep pockets and all the tax advantages Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael magicians can conjure up, working families are effectively shut out of their own housing market. Workers, young couples, nurses, teachers, doctors, gardaí, construction workers and so many more simply cannot compete financially with institutional buyers, which can outbid any offer and absorb homes that should be available first to Irish families. For years, Sinn Féín has warned that allowing vulture funds and investment vehicles to swoop in and hoover up homes makes the housing crisis worse, not better. These funds see these properties not as homes but as profit-making assets, nothing more than entries in a spreadsheet, while children grow up in family hubs or a relative's box room. The vulture funds can outbid ordinary buyers and then extract obscene rental income, pushing up average rents because their focus is on profit, not community or stability. We have already seen historic numbers of homes snapped up. In some estates, 85% of them have been sold to investment funds, leaving those who have scrimped and saved for home ownership fighting against each other for whatever is left. The Government's small stamp duty increase does nothing to stop this corrosive practice. It has tinkered at the edges while this practice continues. Why do we allow entities with effectively unlimited means to outbid families for homes? Who does this benefit? Not ordinary workers or families. Homes are not commodities; they are the foundation blocks of family life and community. Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil and the Government Independents must stop prioritising the interests of developers, landlords and investment funds at the expense of struggling workers and families. The Government must ban investment funds from buying family homes.

Housing remains the single biggest emergency that families and communities face in Ireland. It affects every aspect of our society, from families languishing on council housing lists for 16 years and more, never sure if the dreaded eviction notice is going to land, to teachers, nurses, doctors, gardaí and skilled workers having to move abroad where they can afford mortgages and rents. They cannot do it here. All this is happening while the vulture funds hover, waiting to buy up entire estates. There is nothing acceptable about vulture funds bulk-buying at the expense of workers, families and struggling home buyers. It happens because the Government allows it to happen. In less than five years, house prices have gone up by nearly 50%, with vulture funds competing with ordinary people and driving up prices. While facilitating investment funds in buying up homes, the Government is doing nothing to support the tenant in situ scheme. This scheme was one way of preventing homelessness but the Government has cut the funding and virtually put an end to the scheme. This is having a hugely negative effect on the lives of people living in my constituency. One man working in a haulage company in Swords was left homeless due to a no-fault eviction. He ended up living in the company truck during the week and sleeping on the streets every weekend. He then ended up in hospital quite ill. He has since been discharged back to homelessness and back onto the streets. The home of a struggling young father from Donabate was sold by his landlord and his children had to go back to live in an abusive situation. The father sleeps in a local park and his son is constantly running away from home to be with his dad at the park. These are only two examples of the growing number of cases I am dealing with every single day in my constituency office in Swords. This is the nightmare of Dublin today and the Government is the cause of this. However, it does not have to be like that. Tonight's motion calls on the Government to ban investment funds from buying up family homes. The choice is the Minister's: either he stands with the ordinary people of Ireland or he stands with developers, landlords and vulture funds.

In Limerick, the average price of a semi-detached three-bedroom home has reached more than €345,000. That is a €25,000 increase compared with the end of 2024. Over 16,000 people across the State are availing of emergency accommodation. At the same time, the Minister has cut the tenant in situ funding. He has also failed to increase funding to tackle voids, leaving more than 200 council home properties always vacant in Limerick in the middle of a housing emergency. Last week, to top it off, the Minister pushed through a Bill that will increase yearly rents by €5,000 for up to 60,000 renters. It is a legacy of failure, missteps and an inability or unwillingness to address any aspect of the housing crisis or treat it as the emergency it is. Prior to last year's election, the Government misled voters about the number of housing completions that took place in 2024. It seems each choice it makes results in it being harder and harder for people to avail of much-needed housing. In June 2024, the Tánaiste stated that the bulk purchasing of homes cannot be tolerated, yet in 2025, 293 homes were bulk-purchased to the value of €88 million. Since 2020, property prices have risen by almost 50%. The housing crisis continues unabated, yet the corporate landlords, investors and developers are making even greater profits. It seems the only actions the Government has taken to combat the bulk purchase of homes was the May 2021 decision to introduce a 10% stamp duty on more than ten homes bought in a 12-month period. We warned this step would not work and it has not worked. Today, we present the Government with a choice: ban the bulk purchasing of homes and help those struggling with a near 50% increase in the cost of living or do not ban bulk purchasing. That is the choice the Government can make. If history is anything to go by, I regret to say that once more, the Government will choose developers and corporate landlords over the needs of average citizens.

It is getting harder and harder to own a home every year this Fianna Fáil-Fine Gael coalition is in power. Government is continuously missing housing targets. The prices of houses are soaring. Rents have also reached new highs nationally and are only set to get worse from 1 March, following the Government's disastrous legislation last week. Sinn Féin has continuously and repeatedly offered a solution to help with home ownership. Many will remember a particularly nasty, grim episode from my own constituency of Kildare North when an investment fund sought to purchase 135 homes in Mullen Park in Maynooth. That left a nasty taste in everybody's mouth, I can tell you. The Government's policies have actively driven up prices even further on houses that young people were trying to purchase, locking ordinary families and workers out of new homes in the area. The Government's response to this was to apply a measly 10% levy to those vulture funds on the purchase of ten or more homes. This did not work, along with all of the Government's subsequent attempts to try to solve the housing crisis. None of them is working. House prices only continue to soar year on year in Maynooth and all across my constituency and the State. In Maynooth, the average price for a three-bed second-hand home is up 8% to almost €500,000 - half a million euro to put a roof over your head. It is absolutely crazy. The same can be said for Celbridge, Leixlip and Naas, where house prices have gone up 12% in the past year. The social contract is well and truly broken for people. What chance do young people have? The Government is only short of packing their bags and driving them to the airport. Once more, Sinn Féin is offering a fix here but the Minister just will not take it. Sometimes I wonder whether the Minister actually attend his constituency clinics at all. Does he not hear this week in, week out? It is all that comes into my office every Monday and Friday and on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, my secretary is left to deal with it. The Government can ban vulture funds from snapping up family homes and give young people and families a chance to build a decent life here in Ireland.

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.

It is very disappointing to again see the Minister's failure to support a measure which could help the housing crisis. I thank Sinn Féin and Deputy Doherty for bringing forward the motion. Unfortunately, it is one of many areas where we are seeing the Government claiming that its policies are being developed to promote affordable housing and to promote delivery of housing but, in fact, they are, what I think describes it very accurately, "designed to fail". The Minister had no interest in banning or stopping institutional investors from buying up properties, or buying up what they actually are, namely, homes, because when they were introduced, the measures to restrict the bulk purchase of homes did not apply to apartments, and it is in the countermotion. They were fundamentally flawed from the outset because a huge part of our housing system is being excluded from the measures the Minister is claiming are there to restrict the bulk purchase of homes. Indeed, the guidelines set it out very clearly. When the measures designed to prohibit the bulk buying of houses and duplexes were introduced in 2021, the Department of housing guidelines stated that apartments were not included in this measure. The Minister talks about homes. He is not talking about homes but is only talking about one part of the housing market. Apartments, which are the main type of housing being built in my constituency, across Dublin, in Cork and increasingly in other parts of country, are completely excluded from this, so we have the ongoing bulk purchase of apartments by institutional investors. The reason is the Minister's housing policy has been completely based on institutional investors. I say the Minister's policy but I include Fine Gael in that because there is no real difference between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. Effectively, they are the same party who are completely in bed with the institutional investors. The rental measures the Minister introduced last week were the epitome of turning his back on ordinary people in this country in favour of large corporate investors. The Minister said there is no real concern about this issue of institutional investors and asked what our concern is about this. Does the Minister know how many private rental homes are now owned by institutional landlords in Dublin? Over one in five of all rental properties in Dublin is now owned by big corporate landlords. Why is that a problem? The Minister might be familiar with the economic concept of oligopolies, which are, essentially, where markets can be controlled by a small number of players. In some parts of Dublin, we know this goes as high as 50%. The problem is not only the purchasing of homes; it is then what they are doing with that bulk purchase. It is controlling the market to set the very market rents. The Minister has changed the policy to allow them to do so. They can control the market and set the rent. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have utterly transformed our housing system in a detrimental way by rolling out the red carpet for institutional investors and by allowing them to continue to buy up properties. They see no problem with it. They are blinded to the negative downsides of this and the problem. These funds are not here to build affordable housing. As I have called them previously, they are vampire funds. They are not only vulture funds. Vultures come in, eat the carcasses and hang around for a bit, which the former Minister, Michael Noonan, spoke about. However, what vampire funds are here for is to keep sucking the blood from generation after generation, extracting the rent from them. The Minister is part of facilitating generations in this country who will have their lives destroyed struggling to pay rent to foreign institutional funds. He has turned the nature of our housing market on its head from when Fianna Fáil was supposedly the party standing up for the homeowner, for the middle people and for people to be able to buy their property. Fianna Fáil has turned it on its head and it does not realise how captured it has become. The Minister does not realise it because he is deluding himself about a policy that is about allowing rents rise for renters-tenants. These are the people who fought for and founded this State. The Minister is allowing institutional investors to essentially charge whatever rent they want to people and force them to pay. It is absolutely incredible that he is doing this and I am convinced he is completely captured by them. He does not even accept basic economic arguments as to why it is completely ludicrous to allow rents rise for a supply of housing that will never bring down rents unless we have an economic crash. Under Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, home ownership among younger generations has collapsed. Some 40% of adults aged 25 to 34, or over half a million, are still living with their parents. In Finland and Denmark, it is just 4% and in Sweden, it is just 8% because these Nordic social democracies treat housing as a social good. The Government has a fundamental problem. It is building its housing policy around treating housing as an investment asset for global financial funds. There is a contradiction at the heart of its housing policy. It cannot be a public good, a social good, a human right on the one hand, and an asset that is essentially there to be sweated on the other. There is a problem, as the Minister has seen, at what point they get enough. They never get enough. This is why we have to treat housing as a human right. We will bring forward a Bill to treat housing as a human right, which the Government has failed to do and is at the core of the failure of its housing policies. Regarding affordable housing, and I remember highlighting this for several years, the other thing that happens when policy is driven by ensuring housing is viable, which is essentially profitable to the market, the market being institutional investors in this case, the Government fails to prioritise other policies. Affordable housing is key and institutional investors made it very clear for several years that they do not want to see a significant delivery of affordable housing in this country. Why do they not want to see it? What was the biggest risk they identified? Institutional investors identified very clearly that the biggest risk to their model is an alternative such as affordable housing where people do not have to pay these rents. If people had a choice, would they pay the rents? They absolutely would not. What do we see from Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael? Absolutely pathetic delivery of affordable housing. In 2024, for example, the total local authority affordable purchase houses delivered was 772. Dublin City Council, in my own constituency, delivered 12 local authority affordable purchase homes.; Donegal County Council, not one; Galway City Council, not one; Kerry County Council, not one; Kildare County Council, not one; Offaly, Roscommon and Sligo county councils, not one. I only have the figures for the first three quarters of 2025. Dublin City Council went from 12 to none. Donegal County Council still did not deliver one affordable home. Deputy Doherty is lacking in affordable housing there. Similarly, Galway City Council provided eight affordable purchase homes. Leitrim had none, Kilkenny had none, Louth had 26, Meath had six and Monaghan had none. We can go through it county after county. The Government has seriously said, "We will deliver affordable purchase homes on a major scale through local authorities." No, it has not. I was at a housing committee meeting earlier. I do not know whether the Minister or his advisers were turned into it but it was frustrating and strangely inspiring. We had presentations from representatives of the community land trust organisations and community housing organisations, such as Ó Cualann and others, who discussed the potential for community and co-operative affordable housing. They pointed out that one fifth of the housing in countries such Norway, Sweden and Denmark is different forms of community-led, co-operative housing, which really works to counterbalance the market. For the past 20 years in Ireland, how many community-led, affordable, co-operative-type homes have we built? It has been 150, through Ó Cualann. Indeed, I tabled a parliamentary question directly to the Minister on what Government's policy on co-operative and community-led housing was and he replied that there is no policy. That sums it all up really. We have a potential model to deliver genuinely affordable, community-led housing and what has Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael done with it? Absolutely nothing. It is not even in the Minister's housing plan. He says the Opposition does not come forward with solutions. We have come forward with multiple solutions. We outlined the State savings scheme, for example, a year ago. Where is it? There has been literally nothing moved on it. There is €166 billion sitting there and the Tánaiste is basically going to hand it over to financial markets for people to roll the dice in the casino of the stock market and see if they will make their money instead of using it to guarantee a return to them risk-free. The State would guarantee it and the Minister could build tens of thousands of affordable homes but his boss, the Taoiseach, says, "Cannot do that, it takes too long." Of course it takes too long if you sit on your hands and do not do it. The Minister will be back next year saying, "You have no solutions. It takes too long to set up a State construction company. It takes too long to set up funding", but what does not take long is to jack up the rents for the institutional investors. No, he can do that overnight. What did not take long was guaranteeing the banks and bailing them out in 2008 and throwing this entire society under a bus. That could be done overnight but when it comes to emergency measures to ban families from being made homeless, the Government cannot do that. When it comes to a State construction company, it is a bit complicated, it takes a bit of time and is a bit of a risk. A savings scheme that could funnel billions of euro into affordable housing takes too long and the Government is not able to do that. Of course, it is only interested in certain solutions; the ones that keep the market going. That is where its housing plans are creating continual misery and will not work.

I welcome this proposal and support it. The fact apartments are not included for higher tax and within the maximum of nine needs to change. The Central Bank estimates 47,000 homes are owned in the State by investment institutions or vulture funds, with 500 of those in Laois. This distorts the housing market. It drives up house prices and means these investors are competing with first-time buyers. We need to make thousands of affordable houses to buy and cost-rentals that are not for profit available. There is a chronic shortage of those in Laois. The Minister was there last Friday and I welcome that. He saw some examples of what can be done, even within the strictures at present. The first thing required is money. The Minister cannot pull money out of the sky and I will not come in here and say he can. However, there is €170 billion on deposit in banks and building societies. Several years ago, the Irish League of Credit Unions said to the Government publicly that it had €8 billion or €9 billion and that this could be used for home construction with a modest return on it. That did not happen. There is €170 billion there now so let us have a housing bond scheme for ordinary citizens. They can buy into that and get a modest interest rate tax-free or at a reduced tax rate. Let us use it to solve this issue. Money is needed for housing infrastructure because we need infrastructure to have housing. We also need money for home construction. This needs to become a national mission, similar to the rural electrification scheme. That was only a generation or so ago. We were behind the rest of Europe when we started but by the time we finished in the late 1960s, we were ahead of much of Europe. We can do that again. That needs to be driven by the Housing Agency and the Land Development Agency, with the local councils. The Minister saw what a small council like Laois County Council is doing. It can be done by councils; there is the proof of it. The cohort most under pressure is the squeezed middle. In my book, and it may be lower for Government - Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael - it is those people who are just above the social housing limit of €35,000 income limit and under €70,000 who need assistance. They are unable to get a mortgage and cannot get on a local authority waiting list, so we must have a solution for them. The solution is mixed developments with affordable to buy and cost-rental properties, the very same as what the Minister saw in Rath Rua last Friday, which he will agree is a good development. There is a big demand for one- and two-bedroom accommodation and we must provide that. However, the core element has to be not-for-profit and we must involve ordinary citizens in this. Let us set up a housing bond system. Let us move this away from the investors, as the motion proposes. This needs to be a national initiative. We need to get families and workers owning their own houses or having secure tenancies for life.

I thank Sinn Féin and Deputy Doherty for bringing forward this motion, which I fully support. The Government says that investing in funds helps to increase supply, but that is false. In Donegal, thousands of homes have already been removed from the market because of defective concrete. Families cannot sell. Young people cannot buy. Normal movement has collapsed. To allow these homes to be treated as financial assets is not just wrong; it is immoral. This is not just a local problem. When investors actively push prices up across the country, it makes homes harder to buy and it forces people into already stretched rental markets. The evidence is clear that buying homes for profit does not solve the crisis; it actually makes the crisis worse. The human cost is obvious. Parents are locked out of their own communities, children are forced to leave their communities and families are living in uncertainty. Housing is a right; it is not a commodity. Policy must protect people, and not investors. This is not about markets or profit margins: it is about mothers, fathers, sons and daughters whose homes and futures are being sold to the highest bidder. If we cannot protect them, we are failing, the Government is failing and society is failing. The Government is talking about regeneration. We need action, not regeneration. We need action now.

Homeownership is very dear to the hearts of Irish people. It should be a reasonable hope of any family but homeownership has nose-dived and is sadly now a dream rather than a reality. Property prices have increased by over 47% since 2020, locking large numbers out of homeownership, and driving those lucky enough to secure a house into debt. The housing emergency in the State is driving middle and low-income families into whatever private rented accommodation that is available at extortionate rents. Meanwhile, the corporate landlords, the institutional investors and the big developers make handsome profits. Unaffordable rip-off rents mean that couples cannot even save towards a deposit. Rents are now as high as €2,500 per month. Families cannot save. In fact, families are living week to week. We can throw into this mix the fact that institutional investors continue to bulk purchase family homes. This drives up prices and deprives ordinary families of homes. Investment funds purchased 2,000 houses between May 2021 and the end of 2025, attracting the higher rate of stamp duty. This is the tip of the iceberg because these investment funds can buy up to nine houses at a time without attracting the higher rate of stamp duty. It is no wonder that teachers, gardaí, nurses and many middle-range public servants cannot buy a house. Many are condemned to long-term renting at unaffordable rip-off rents, or must stay in the box room of the family home. Last weekend, a feature in the Sunday Independent showed that even when both people are working, couples cannot afford to buy a home and, of course, cannot access a local authority housing list. A teacher from County Wicklow spoke about the situation in a recent edition of InTouch, which is the monthly magazine of the Irish National Teachers Organisation: I am a qualified Irish teacher in my early 30s. Despite holding an AP2 post, home ownership is still out of reach. On a post-2011 pay scale, my salary cannot meet today's housing reality. The average house in Wicklow now costs close to €400,000 - far beyond what one income can support. Even with a partner earning the same, buying is still not feasible. It is no wonder that many of the brightest and the best are to be found in Sydney, Melbourne, Toronto, Boston, London and the Middle East. This housing emergency is undermining the very fabric of Irish society. The social contract between the State and the public has collapsed. Stopping the purchase of family homes by investment funds would be a small but significant start in repairing that damage.

I welcome this Sinn Féin motion, particularly because it focuses on vulture funds, investment funds, cuckoo funds or whatever you want to call them. We are talking about large-scale property ownership where they buy a property and sell it on or rent it at a massive profit. Tomorrow yet another family in my constituency is facing the sheriff. They have gone through all of the court process to try to save the home they have rented for ten years. They are actually a Palestinian family, which is ironic. Many Palestinians are facing homelessness, in my experience, having escaped occupation or genocide. This family has lived and worked in the area for a long time. Their property is owned by the Vestry group. It is a complex web of companies all with their fingers in the Irish home market, or should we say the Irish homeless market. Vestry has numerous cases at the Residential Tenancies Board, RTB, where it is evicting families on a regular basis. Dublin City Council offered to buy a property from Vestry but Vestry declined the market rate. It has a vacant apartment next door to one particular family, whose case was highlighted in an article, but it has no interest in letting that family remain or rent in the neighbouring property. This is because they want to get a new tenant in at a higher rate, thanks to the Government's new laws that actually encourage this, and make so much more money. That is also the case with the Palestinian family in my constituency. This family is currently paying €1,600 but there is no doubt that Vestry will get another potential €1,000 on top of that. The community action tenants union, CATU, has a Vestry hotline. This is how bad it is. I would love to hear what the attitude of the Minister, Deputy Browne, to this is. In 2023 The Ditch highlighted that Vestry controls 850 homes and is making €20 million in profits. Richard Moyles, one of the shareholders, has many other links. Silk Shadow Limited, one of the minority owners of this company, was bailed out by NAMA in 2011. Its €22 million loans were bailed out by NAMA and the taxpayer. It is now back in business and raking it in on the back of evictions yet again. Moyles is also a director of Be Lettings, which has a portfolio of homes and apartments and-----

I need to caution the Deputy about naming private individuals in the Chamber.

Yes. It is just factual and it is in the newspapers anyway. This is all from articles I have researched. Be Lettings and Vestry buy and sell from each other. It is unbelievable stuff. One effect of such house flipping in Dublin 15, in my own constituency, is that a three-bedroom, two-bathroom semi-detached house in Dublin 15 that was bought in November 2019 for €287,000 was sold in January 2025 for approximately €400,000. The transaction involved the same two companies that own each other. What is the Minister going to do about this? Seriously. As I said in a previous debate, I have to ring the sheriff to try to get these evictions put back. I cannot be the only TD in the House doing this. There must be other TDs doing the same. It is not my job to try to reorganise accommodation for people. If anything, it is the Minister's job. I also want to make a point about the statutory declaration that these companies have to give. They can just get it from one of their other companies, and then they do not really sell on the property. I do not doubt that many of the new tenants who are going to be put into these evicted properties will be HAP tenants, which means the State will be paying the increase in the rent. There seems to be absolutely no interest from this Government in dealing with the vulture funds and investment funds that are eking out massive profits off the back of evictions and misery in suburbs, towns and counties throughout the State.

The housing crisis that has been the responsibility of Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and now the Independents in government is a crisis that is ripping apart the fabric of Irish society. Communities are suffering significantly across the country during this housing crisis. Obviously, those most affected are the 17,000 people who are currently homeless in this State. Thousands of other people are forced to stay in their families' box rooms just to survive. The GAA generation has been forced to emigrate, in large part. It is incredible that we have never had such a level of jobs but, at the same time, young people are being forced to emigrate. The birth rate is falling significantly as a result of many families putting off having children or not being able to have children at all. We see that in schools, with many not getting the necessary number of children into junior and senior infants. The housing crisis debate in this Chamber has been extremely limited for the past five years. It has been between a Government allergic to the building of public houses and an Opposition which has pretty much ignored the building of private houses. That limited debate has contributed to the severity of the housing crisis. We in Aontú believe a society needs to have both functioning properly in order to deliver housing. The Minister of State is shaking his head. A number of years ago, I rang Meath County Council to ask how many public houses were built in the State at that time. There were four in that year. For a decade, nearly a generation, Governments stopped building public houses in this State. We believe strongly a bird cannot fly on one wing. The solution needs to involve both delivering public housing and fixing the broken private housing system. The truth of the matter is that there is a number of significant barriers to young couples buying homes. Most of those barriers are in the gift of the Government. It is not rocket science. These barriers can be overcome. There is incompetence in the Government in terms of overcoming them at the moment. That is why it is so frustrating to see the damaging fallout from the housing crisis throughout society. The first issue is red tape and bureaucracy. For years, Governments have been layering red tape and bureaucracy onto the system. The Opposition, in the main, has been shouting for more. We are the slowest for planning, licensing, permitting, tendering and judicial review. Until a couple of months ago, nobody but Aontú was talking about this. The Government has started to talk about it recently. It is within the Government's ability to fix that issue and it has been refusing to fix it. We have the highest number of judicial reviews. The greater Dublin drainage project is an example. Some 100,000 homes depended on it and it was ten years caught up in the planning system. I know of planning applications 30,000 pages long, needing trucks or vans to bring them into a local authority, and of four separate formats for a planning application to deal with four separate agencies. That issue is the Government's fault. It has created it and allowed it to happen. The second issue is the lack of infrastructure. For at least ten years, this country was second from bottom in European terms for infrastructural spend - only Romania was worse. Uisce Éireann was before us in the committee recently. I asked its representatives when the gaps blocking the building of homes would be filled so homes could be built. They said it would take until 2050. There is a shocking lack of serviced zoned land in this country. Again, that is down to Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. The third barrier is viability. If we cannot make building a house viable, houses simply will not be built. Incredibly, 30 of the top 50 construction companies in this country are working abroad and sending their workers abroad because it is not viable to build in the Irish market. The RTB Bill was designed to make homebuilding more viable, for sure, by pushing up rents, but it put the pressure on the tenants to pay for that viability. We believe it should put the pressure on the taxpayer to pay for that viability. It reduced VAT on the building of apartments. Why does it not reduce VAT on the building of houses? The same logic is there, except the viability question comes into play for families rather than for investment funds. In other jurisdictions, such as the North of Ireland, there is no VAT on family homes. The Government should be looking at that issue. Those are three examples of the Government putting in place barriers to the building of homes. We have been stuck in this shocking, damaging, Groundhog Day conversation for the past ten years about Governments' inability to build the most important priority need that a family has, and that is a roof over their heads. My worry is we will be here in another five years having the same old staid conversation between the two ideologically opposed groups. Nobody can think creatively about removing the barriers facing young families in terms of housing.

You wanted to put them in government, Peadar.

You were actually willing to go with Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael - both parties. We refused to go in.

You are only angry that you are not in-----

The Deputies are eating into other contributors' time.

We do not do anything like that in our group.

The Deputies are eating into their colleagues' time. I call Deputy Collins.

We support this motion because behind every statistic is a family like the one I met last week. They were parents who missed repayments after illness and a job loss. They begged their bank for help and tried to restructure. Instead, they had their mortgage sold off in a bundle to a vulture fund. The house they built a life in is gone but the letters keep coming, telling them they still owe every cent. The fund, having bought the loan at a knock-down price, is now chasing them for the full balance with interest. That is not a market; it is an injustice. We know how we got here. After the crash, vast loan books were offloaded at deep discounts. The clearest benchmark is NAMA's own numbers: €74 billion in par value loans ultimately sold for €38.1 billion - about 43% off face value. The discount went to the fund, but the bills stayed with the families and they were never offered the same deal. When these loans are transferred, families often face punishing interest rates and gaps in protection. Thousands of borrowers whose mortgages were sold to non-banks have been hit with rates in the 8% to 10% range while being effectively trapped and unable to switch. Even the Central Bank acknowledged legal loopholes in past years that left some of these borrowers outside normal Ombudsman protections. That is a systematic failure, not a personal one. The moral is wrong. It is that the distressed mortgage is worth more to the fund dead than alive. It can be more profitable to evict a family than to help a family to stay because the fund can extract the full balance, even though it bought the debt at a discount, and never have to offer the family the same terms. If there is any decency left in policy, families must have the right to restructure or buy back their loans on the same basis at which the fund acquired it. This motion is not radical. It is retrospective. Ban investment funds from buying family homes. Close the loopholes. Stop the bulk-buying. Shut the revolving door of repossession and resale that treats homes as yields and families as entries on a spreadsheet. In 2023, 623 homes were bulk purchased by 16 investors - hundreds of keys that should have gone to first-time buyers. The so-called deterrent of stamp duty has plainly not worked. If anyone here still thinks this is just about numbers on a balance sheet, they should look at the human cost today. As we enter 2026, we are at a historic high: 17,000 people are homeless, including over 4,000 children. A home is not a financial instrument; it is where a child does homework and a parent finds rest after a long day. Offer families the same deal the vulture funds get. Put homes back in the hands of the people. Pass this motion, for fairness, for decency and for the families we are elected to protect.

I thank the Sinn Féin Party for bringing this motion to the House. This is not about stopping funds but about building enough homes for Irish families to be able to afford to live in their own communities. It is well worth noting that. We know that 41% of people aged 18 to 34 are still living in their parents' box rooms. That is a fact. Since 2020, house prices are up by 40%. Rents increased by 84% from 2020 to 2022. Some places are recording increases of between 150% and 200% in rents. Last week the Government brought to the House what it thought was a great idea with the residential tenancies Bill. What it has achieved is moving out the small landlords. The people who depended on a second house, which they may have inherited, are getting out of the business because the Government put in the six years criterion without thinking of people going into homes who may need to sell the estate to finance that, and without thinking of people renting out their homes to students from UCC, UG or UCD for nine months. It is not thinking about that at all. It has created a monster. Everything the Government is doing is creating a monster. It is putting extra red tape around everything and destroying things. The Government seems to be working these days for the likes of Pepper Finance and these repossession companies that are using both the Commercial Court and the District Court as collection agencies, screwing people to the wall. The Galway tent may have closed but the alignment that Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have with developers and these types of people is still very evident by the continuous bills and tax exemptions it seems to give to these people. Huge apartment blocks can be seen in Cherrywood and people think they must be full, but a lot of them are empty. They are being rented out in stages – ten here and ten there – mainly to keep up the price of the rent, which is in excess of €2,000. The developer does not want to lose that €2,000-plus rent that he or she can command. We have a lot of empty apartment blocks around this city - I suspect it is similar around other cities – where the demand is falsified in order to ensure there is very tight and limited supply. I heard Members in the House talk about a State construction company and how the State should take charge. I would not put this Government in charge of anything any more. We have seen what it has done with the bike shed outside the door and the children’s hospital. In fact, if we put the Government in charge of the dog’s home, I am pretty sure all the members of the Government would come home with fleas. That is how poor and bad this Government has been.

I am glad to get the opportunity to speak. I did not think my slot was coming up so soon. It is very tough for young couples now who are trying to purchase, build or hold onto a home. When it comes to building homes in Kerry, there are a lot of people who would build their home if they could get planning permission, but they cannot because of the strict rules with urban-generated pressure. Locals are being denied planning permission without ever coming out of a town. The urban-generated pressure rule was brought in to stop people coming out from urban areas to rural areas, but it is not only doing that; it is stopping locals from getting planning permission on a site they might get from their father, mother or neighbour, which would allow them to be close to home. If they are not the son or daughter of a farmer, they will not be allowed. It is very sad. For the past ten years or more, I have been very angry and upset about banks transferring loans to vulture funds. Whether it is a farm or a house, the receivers come and do their best. In many cases, they have succeeded in selling homes and property whose rightful owners ran into a bit of bother. If a couple got into trouble, I always thought it would be a great idea if the Department of housing or whoever could pay off their mortgage, or whatever it is, and let the young couple or people in trouble rent back the house for a while until they got on their feet again. That is not happening, however. The receivers just do not mind. In many cases, they did not even get court orders to allow them to sell the places. They just went on and sold them. That happened and it was never right. On one of the nights before Christmas, a gang of youngsters came in. Although I call them “youngsters”, they ranged in ages between 28 and 33. There were 17 of them. While they all had good, professional jobs, they felt they could not afford to purchase or build a house in Ireland. They were all leaving their jobs behind to go to Australia. All of them, alongside their boyfriends and girlfriends, were leaving after Christmas to different parts of Australia. The group totalled 17. It is terrible. We are losing very bright, energetic people. It galls me when I hear so much talk about affordable homes. No homes will be affordable until we do something about VAT and the cost of them. We need to do something like that. In England, there is no VAT on building materials. I cannot understand why we cannot either reduce VAT or get rid of it altogether to make building materials affordable. In Kerry, it would mean an awful lot to people if they could get planning permission. We are doing very good with social housing but people who want to build a house are coming up against all of that. They cannot get planning permission or afford a house, despite having good jobs. For example, a couple, one a garda and the other a teacher, cannot afford the houses. I can understand how they run into trouble. It would hurt me very much as well if I thought some of these foreign investors were buying up those types of homes. We must do our level best to ensure that does not happen. We are here invariably every night and day talking about housing. The time for talking has to stop. We will have to do something constructive in this regard. I did not agree with the Bill last week to make people rent out their houses for six years. For those people who own, buy or are trying to pay back a house, it is their constitutional and democratic right to do whatever they like with it. That is how I feel about it and nothing will ever move me from that viewpoint. I have always felt that no one has a right to go through someone’s place, be it a farm or whatever, without their say-so. The same applies to a second home or whatever it is that people are renting out. They should not be forced. There are other ways. We have so many vacant houses. Surely we could entice those houseowners to rent them in some way or other. We must also ensure that we do not lose any more of our people. The Department of housing should step in if a young couple are in trouble and cannot hold onto the house. I am over time.

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.

I reassert the Government's commitment and determination to tackle the challenges that exist in our housing sector. We understand the need to ensure that sufficient numbers of homes are delivered, be they social, affordable or private, and that is why we are working tirelessly to address the blockages that exist and to implement policies that make a positive difference to supply. While there is still much to do, the motion initiated this evening by Sinn Féin Deputies does not fairly represent the efforts and progress made to date. The Government has, therefore, tabled a counter-motion to reflect its position and the positive actions that continue to be taken. It is important that I reiterate the real progress that has been made in recent years, as outlined by the Minister, Deputy James Browne, in his opening statement, including those relating to social and affordable housing delivery, and to set out the key changes introduced and our plans ahead to scale up the supply of housing across all tenure types. Some 52,300 social homes were delivered between July 2020 and quarter 3 of 2025. The quarter 4 data will be published soon and will show continued strong performance. Over 14,100 homes have been brought back into use under the voids programme. More than 18,900 affordable housing supports had been provided by quarter 3 of 2025, increasing home ownership for families and ordinary workers. Over the past five years, almost 149,000 new homes have been delivered in this country. This is significant progress, which the Opposition motion ignores. Of course, we know that we need to do more. The Government has implemented a range of measures to ensure a balanced housing market across all tenure types. In May 2021, conscious of the need to increase stock for home ownership, the Government introduced a series of measures designed to prevent bulk buying of houses and duplexes. A higher stamp duty of 10% was introduced where ten or more houses are acquired within a 12-month period. That rate was increased to 15% in budget 2025. The section 28 guidance for planning authorities on the regulation of commercial institutional investment in housing aimed to prevent multiple housing and duplex units being sold to a single buyer. These guidelines seek to provide an owner-occupier guarantee by ensuring that new own-door houses and duplex units in lower density housing developments should no longer be bulk-purchased by institutional investors in a manner that causes the displacement of individual purchasers or social and affordable housing, including cost rental. This measure does not apply to housing to be provided for social and affordable housing purposes or apartments. It should be recognised that through this measure, we have succeeded in preventing the inappropriate bulk purchase of a significant number of homes and securing those homes for purchase by homeowners. From May 2021 to the end of last year, a total estimate of almost 64,000 houses and duplex units have received planning permission with a condition restricting bulk purchase or multiple sales to a single purchaser. The trend in the bulk acquisition of houses is down significantly since 2023 and this will continue in the time ahead because of the owner-occupier guarantee, which we, as a Government, introduced. It is the case that the bulk purchase of houses referenced in the motion before us relates to residual planning permissions that were received before May 2021, of which there are now a significantly reduced number. Indeed, it is a fact that institutional investors are now net sellers of properties in Ireland. Housing delivery at scale and pace requires us to stimulate supply in the housing market. It is not something that any one sector, agency or profession can deliver in isolation. It depends on partnership between central and local government, between the public and private sectors, between planners, developers, infrastructure providers, financiers and communities themselves. The Government's new housing plan, Delivering Homes, Building Communities, recognises this and expects that all people and organisations will play their part in delivering the homes we need and tackling the challenges we face in housing today. The State will support the wider use of standardised designs across the public and private sectors to promote efficient delivery and will drive the adoption of efficient and innovative construction practices, as well as the use of modern methods of construction, at a greatly increased scale to build a more resilient, effective and efficient sector. To achieve the delivery of 300,000 new homes under the Delivering Homes, Building Communities action plan, we will require an estimated €20 billion of development finance per year as we all recognise that level of investment is sought in a highly competitive international environment. One of the key challenges identified is apartment viability. As part of Delivering Homes, Building Communities, Government has introduced a suite of complementary measures, including the introduction of a 9% VAT rate on the sale of apartments, which the Opposition opposed, with the sole aim of increasing viability. A fourth call for expressions of interest under the croí conaithe cities scheme was introduced in July of last year and it is helping activate thousands of planning permissions for apartments in our five cities. The housing activation office was established in April of last year to accelerate homebuilding by unblocking infrastructure delays and co-ordinating investment in servicing zoned land. The office supports public infrastructure planning and investment for the delivery of new sustainable communities and transport-orientated development. The office, which will be headed up by a new deputy secretary general for housing activation, has undertaken both formal and informal engagement with various stakeholders to identify and address infrastructure barriers to housing delivery and to develop a co-ordinated programme of investment with key infrastructure agencies and the local government sector. Last month the Government announced a new multi-annual €1 billion housing infrastructure investment fund to support direct investment in housing-enabling infrastructure. The new fund will be managed by the housing activation office and will complement investment by infrastructure agencies such as Uisce Éireann and ESB Networks as part of a more co-ordinated approach. It will focus on projects that can move quickly at scale because we want strong, deliverable projects that can hit the ground running and start unblocking housing delivery immediately. Before I reference the investment in housing in the context of the national development plan, there are a couple of planning matters some Deputies have referenced this evening. It is important to note all local authorities, with the exception of the Cork authorities, which are moving to it shortly, now have eplanning in place and over 80% of applications are being made online. References to truckloads of paper being required for planning applications are therefore no longer valid. Of course I want to see a reduced number of judicial reviews, as Deputies have referenced, but it is important to note in the context of the comment on the slowest planning process, that all LRD applications for housing of 100 units or more have all been disposed of by An Coimisiún Pleanála in less than 16 weeks and the cases the commission has on hand have reduced from a high of 3,700 in May 2024 to 1,300 cases last month. In the context of investment in housing, the national development plan indicates we will spend €102 billion over the next five years. Some €40 billion of this funding will be provided for housing and related water services to 2030. This demonstrates how seriously we as a Government are treating this matter. The funding will support vital water infrastructure projects and address historical bottlenecks in the system. In 2026 alone we will see overall capital funding of just over €9 billion for housing, so contrary to what the Opposition is saying here the State is the single biggest investor in housing in the country. We as a Government recognise we have to accelerate the delivery of homes. This will require unlocking additional land through zoning and through our local authorities and removing structural barriers to the building of homes whether those are due to the planning system, infrastructure or land availability. It also means providing a record level of investment, which we are doing as a Government. It also means appealing to those who are objecting to housing to take a look at the wider good, the common good and the need that is out there before they make an objection to housing. I say that to every Member of this Chamber, be they in government or opposition. Objecting to housing at a time of such need is simply madness.

I will tell the Minister of State what madness is. It is repeating the same speech Ministers and Ministers of State have been making for the past ten years at a time it is blatantly evident that Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael simply are not capable of dealing with the housing crisis. Many people chose to forget the two so-called opponents of Irish politics, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, were forced to drop the facade and coalesce in large part as a response to the public outcry in 2020 at the housing crisis and the failures of those parties to address it. Let us ask what has happened since. Let us compare December 2020 to where we are now. House prices have increased by almost 50%. Rents have increased year on year to levels that would have once been unimaginable and what did the two parties in government do, supported by rural Independents? They introduced legislation that will allow those rents to accelerate even faster. I do not need to remind the house that homelessness figures have increased time and time again. We recall at different points the outrages and the things that spurred communities across Ireland to action. One of those occasions was in 2021 when it was disclosed that an investment fund attempted to buy 135 of 170 homes on an estate in Maynooth. There was of course outrage that this could be happening and the commitment we received from Ministers then was that this would never happen as they would put a stop to it. They did not put a stop to it, just as they have not lived up to any of their targets and have not delivered the homes people need at prices they can afford. The motion is as simple as anything; it seeks to prevent investment funds from buying homes that should be available to Irish families in desperate need of them. Any Member who refuses to support that has no authority whatsoever to claim they are in any way interested in resolving the housing crisis.

Vulture funds are robbing many of our young people of the opportunity to ever have a home of their own in their country. The Government is still allowing these vampires to snap up properties in bulk across the State and rent them back to people at inflated prices. How can families, young couples or first-time buyers outbid these massive investment fund? They simply cannot and it is wrong, disgusting and goes against everything represented by our founding fathers whose statues look down upon us in here. The Government is failing an entire generation who are despairing, resigned, and see no future for themselves in Ireland. Who could blame them? In counties Wexford and Wicklow, grown adults are living with their parents in box rooms, forced to move back into those homes because they have no other option save risking homelessness. I have spoken to many young people who are doing everything right. They are working hard, saving every month and scraping together a deposit. Prices are rising and the goalposts keep getting moved. Why is this? One of the reasons is the Government has failed time and time again to keep its promise to stop investment funds bulk-purchasing family homes. Over 2,000 of these homes have been bulk-purchased since the Government introduced measures it claimed would put an end to this practice. These vulture funds can buy up to nine houses without triggering higher stamp duty and face absolutely no restrictions whatsoever on purchasing apartments in bulk. Consequently, we have the US private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management swooping in on distressed properties to a total of $19 billion. The name "Cerberus" is quite ironic. In Greek mythology it is a monstrous multi-headed dog guarding the entrance to the underworld. It is a very fitting name for a vulture fund devouring the dreams of our young people. I am asking all TDs, especially Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil ones in Wicklow and Wexford to support Sinn Féin's motion to stop vulture funds buying up family homes.

The Government's answer to the housing crisis caused by Governments its members were also members of is to encourage mainly foreign investment funds to buy up land to build apartments and to bulk-buy housing stock and estates. We have had an influx of such investment funds over the years because Governments have in the past created advantageous market positions for them by giving them favourable tax exemptions and grants. Investment funds have also taken advantage of stamp duty loopholes and exploited regulatory gaps that allow them to act with fewer restrictions than apply to traditional financial institutions. All this has had a detrimental effect on the cost of housing and apartments and has made homeownership unaffordable for ordinary workers and families. Young families and people who want to get on the property ladder cannot compete with such large institutions. Many can barely afford the exorbitant rents being sought. In my constituency of Dublin North-West, a company that bought an entire housing estate in County Kildare bought entire apartment blocks in Santry to rent them out at exorbitant rates. It had been known for some time that investment funds have been bulk-buying houses in estates across the constituency. This has resulted not just a rise in the price of houses but also a significantly reduced supply of houses for first-time buyers. The Government has not put in place any real deterrents for this sort of bulk buying. Its 15% stamp duty rate on bulk acquisitions has not stopped investment funds from continuing to buy properties. In this housing crisis, it is a scandal that foreign investment funds can bulk-buy houses. It is scandal that the Government has created the conditions to allow them to do this. This has to stop and if it continues, it is clear that many people never be able to own their own home or even afford the rents being sought.

As I said earlier, the motion is a simple proposition. At its core it asks the Government to do what it said it was going to do, namely fulfil its commitment given before the election in the form of the Minister, Deputy Harris, and what it put in the programme for Government in black and white for all of us to see. The Minister of State referred to many other aspects of housing we could get into debates about such as how the Government missed its targets over and over, how it is pushing house prices beyond the reach of ordinary people, how it has allowed institutional investors to buy of most of Dublin and rent it out at extortionate rates and how it continues to allow investors to pay no tax on rent. All of those issues can be discussed at a separate time. The motion is simple. It is about whether we believe that vulture funds with unlimited capital should be allowed to come in here and buy up and bulk-purchase houses from under the noses of first-time buyers. Young couples who have scrimped and saved and done everything right and everything they can to be able to purchase their forever home find international capital is allowed to come in here by Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil and outbid them over and over again for houses. Not only are they outbidding first-time buyers, they are pushing up prices for all of the other people in the same situation. Let us see what was said on the record. The Minister, Deputy Harris, the man who says whatever needs to be said at any given time, wrote to the Minister for Finance and said this cannot be tolerated. Deputy Barry Ward spoke about how the Government introduced stamp duty and referred to the desire to stop this happening. The programme for Government was crystal clear in 2025 on keeping the stamp duty surcharge under review to ensure it prohibited bulk purchases. What is happening? Bulk purchases are still happening. Nearly 300 homes last year were accounted for, but we know there are many more because up to nine homes can be bulk-purchased without being registered. Bulk-purchases in their hundreds are still happening. The amendment that Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Independents who back up this shoddy Government are about to vote for states that the Government believes the measures are having the desired effect. That is where the mask slips for the Government. I made the point that the vote is simple. We need to pick a side. We either pick the side of the vultures or the side of ordinary people. That is what it is about. The Minister in his opening remarks said that the challenge is balance and preventing the inappropriate bulk-purchasing of family homes. What is appropriate bulk-purchasing of family homes? Were the 293 houses were snapped up from first-time buyers last year all appropriate? Who is determining this? What the Government is allowing to happen is outrageous. It is more outrageous that the Minister, Deputy Simon Harris, promised to end it and that Deputy Barry Ward said stamp duty is about a desire to stop this happening, yet the programme for Government states it will prohibit bulk-purchasing. The Government has an option to ban it and vote to say that it will end this practice. There may be little else we can get right on housing, but we can do this. With the stroke of a pen, we can increase the stamp duty to 100%, 200% or whatever the Government wants. That would make sure it is impossible for vulture funds to swoop in here with the support of Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Independents who support the Government and buy those houses from under the noses of first-time buyers. Anybody who states that they are on the side of first-time buyers knows what they need to do. They need to pick a side, and it is not the side of the vultures they should be on.

Hear, hear.

In accordance with Standing Order 85(2), the division is postponed until the weekly division time on Wednesday, 18 February 2026