Richard Boyd Barrett: Blasts Developer Profits Amid Housing Crisis

Headline from RTE earlier this year, half-year profits at Glen Vey properties soar. Those profits were revenues up in the first six months of this year, up 125% from the previous year, more than double, from £152 million to £341 million. Gross profit in half a year, £66.8 million. Cairn profits last year, £63 million in the first half of 2025. But you want to give them more. It's not enough that Glen Vey's profits go up by 125% and that Cairn, the other big builder, just to name the two biggest and most profitable, are making eye-watering profits, shareholders enjoying bonanza year after year, executives enjoying absolutely obscene salaries, but you want to give them more, £340 million more. And then you just look at the prices they're charging for the houses, I was just flicking through them. One bedroom house, Glen Vey in Donabate, €345,000. Two bed, €440,000. Three bed, €480,000. Four bed, €700,000. There's a similar picture in the rest of them. Completely unaffordable for the vast, vast majority of working people who go out, work hard, but would be absolutely incapable, with their own income, to be able to afford those kind of prices. So we're giving them a subsidy on already massive profits to deliver housing that no working people can afford. And you honestly think that that's justified, and that's a strategy to deal with the housing crisis. And it does, you know, beg the question, are you serious at all, or does this reveal the truth that you are there to represent the interests of the property developers and the profits they want to make? Because that is the consistent story, in my opinion, it is the dirty secret of the housing crisis that has persisted now for more than a decade, is the only thing that explains your failure to deal with the housing crisis, is that all along your only interest was to ensure the profits of the speculators and the property developers. The vulture funds, the hedge funds that got all the NAMA lands at discount prices, made massive profits, and control the supply of housing, and then sold it on to these gangs, or giving them land that should be, the public land bank, that should be in public control, and where we drive, in the public interest, the construction of housing. You know, in the area around Helsinki and Finland, it is one of the few places where they have actually improved the situation with the housing crisis, the land bank is completely controlled publicly. And they decide, it does not mean there is no private building, but it does mean that the only housing that happens is housing that is actually going to contribute towards addressing the housing crisis and the housing needs of the people, and therefore they have seen homelessness go down. Whereas we have seen homelessness go through the roof every year, worse than the last. The vast majority of working people priced out of the market, but the developers, the hedge funds, the landlords, making eye-watering profits. So either it is incompetence on a scale that is simply staggering on the part of the government, or actually the truth is, what you are actually doing is very deliberately benefiting the profiteers at the expense of the people who are suffering. Because under no circumstances can you justify saying that companies making that level of profits need more profits in order to stimulate the situation, right? In order to be convinced to build. And you should not be in a situation where they have the state over a barrel, because that's what they are doing. They say, do this for us, and Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael jump, jump to the tune. It is absolutely shocking. But if we controlled the land bank, stopped all the speculation, and developed a state construction company where we start to build on a not-for-profit basis, we could solve the housing crisis. How do we know that? Because when this country had nothing in the 30s, 40s and 50s, when it was an impoverished, virtual third world country, we were able to build housing at affordable levels for working people in this country. So how can we not do it now with record budget surpluses? We can. We can. But you are having your policies dictated to you by the people who are profiteering from the housing misery by others. It is as simple as that. And it's got to stop. It's got to stop. And the fact that your Department of Finance, which you now have entered into, has said itself in a report that on a no-policy-change basis, we are facing another 15 years of a housing crisis. It's unbelievable. But yet you are not proposing to change policy. You are proposing to continue with the policies and the priorities that have failed to address the housing crisis for 15 years, have caused the housing crisis, and where your own department is now telling you the crisis is going to go on for another 15 years. It's unbelievable. Or it's totally believable if you understand that the government is simply doing what the speculators and profiteers want and has no interest whatsoever in the people rotting in emergency accommodation or in the lives and hopes and aspirations of young people and working people in this country who have been completely locked out of any hope of being able to afford the house prices that these guys who are making obscene profits are charging for houses and when they control and manipulate the entire housing sector. It's got to stop. It's got to stop. Because the working people, the young people in this country cannot continue with this stuff.