Many landlords are avoiding their obligations to provide social and affordable housing as part of new residential developments, Labour Party leader Pat Rabbitte claimed today.
Developers have effectively neutered the provisions of the Planning and Development Act, 2000, for up to a fifth of all new housing developments to be reserved for social and affordable homes, he said.
Mr Rabbitte was speaking at the Parnell Summer School, at Avondale House, Co Wicklow, on the legacy of social campaigner and Irish Land League founder Michael Davitt.
His remarks come just over a fortnight after a report by homeless charity Focus Ireland claimed developers were increasingly using cash payments to local authorities to bypass their obligations for social and affordable housing, as provided for under law.
"As a result we have developed a new urban landlord or renter class funding their political favourites and in return collecting their rents, financed in many cases by the taxpayer", said Mr Rabbitte.
"We have a new landlord, indeed speculative class, serious issues of affordability in housing, the emergence of estate management companies and an inability or unwillingness on the part of the state - whether at national or local level - to plan, to intervene, impose order and shape on what is now increasingly incoherent physical development," he said.
Social housing is being transferred into the private sector with new apartments being funded by tax breaks and paid for by tenants on housing rental supplement, according to the Labour leader.
"The young mother, a single parent, living as a private sector tenant in the absence of a proper public housing policy, finds herself in our newest property trap," he said.
"If she goes to work she loses her supplement, can no longer pay her rent, is evicted and is replaced by someone who is willing to pay supplement, not go to work and happy to be a source of income for the landlord, a conduit for the handing over of public monies to favoured private sector 'entrepreneurs', creating a spanking new, yet another, poverty trap."
Fine Gael's education spokeswoman Olwyn Enright told the summer school the desire of ordinary people to own their home in Davitt's time was as unattainable then as it is now.
"We may well be pricing ourselves back to a time of two Irelands, those who own a property and those who, no matter how much they desire it, may never have that chance," she said.
"There are 100,000 individuals on social housing waiting lists. There are thousands and thousands of our young people making long commutes from home to work and work to home. The soil of Ireland, or even a very small plot of it, will remain beyond the reach of so many unless we address this situation."