A petition calling for government action on the housing crisis has been presented to the Cabinet ahead of their meeting today.
The petition has over 25,000 signatures and demands the government scrap tax breaks for cuckoo funds, investor-backed Private Rental Sector funds that are buying up rental properties across the country.
The government is also being asked to improve the building of public housing, strengthen tenant rights and put the right to a home in the constitution.
The petition was started by Dr Rory Hearne, Assistant Professor in Social Policy at Maynooth University.
Dr Hearne has said that the public is condemning cuckoo funds “buying up homes … and renting them out at unaffordable rates.”
Speaking to The Mirror, he said that public support has been outstanding: “Collecting 25,000 signatures in just over a week is phenomenal. It shows there are thousands affected by this crisis who need real action immediately by Government.”
“Generation Rent and Generation LockedOut are demanding radical change on housing,” he says.
The housing crisis is “affecting first time buyers, renters, those stuck living at home, the homeless and it all comes back to the Government not building social and affordable homes and opening up our housing system.”
Campaign group Uplift has also shown support for the petition.
Deputy Director of Uplift, Emily Duffy, has said that generations who have suffered under Ireland’s housing crisis are “hopeful and defiant,”
“My generation were told that we could either leave Ireland or accept a terrible quality of life of unaffordable housing, insecure jobs and underfunded primary health care.”
Duffy says the government has an obligation to “build public homes we can all afford, and end tax breaks for the rich, or they’ll very rapidly become even more politically irrelevant with younger generations.”
The detailed petition is calling on the Cabinet to:
- Scrap investor tax breaks
- Impose investor tax of 50% on profits
- Restrict the sale of new developments to individual home buyers & not for profits
- Build public & affordable homes on huge state lands
- Right to housing in our Constitution
- Remove landlords ability to evict tenants for sale & no fault evictions
