People Before Profit Councillor Conor Reddy (Dublin North West) and Ollie Power (Fingal East) will be in Swords at 1pm today, Sunday 13th October to visit the site of the twenty-five vacant homes at Fosterstown Place owned by Ryanair and the 85 homes under construction by MKN properties on the adjacent Hollytree House site.
They will pitch tents at Fosterstown Place to highlight the homeless crisis and bring their “Homes for Need” petition demanding that the 25 vacant homes are made available to people on the housing list and that Hollytree House is taken into public ownership.
Conor Reddy said: “The fact that Ryanair is being allowed to hoard 25 empty family homes while 4,419 children are homeless is both an insult to those homeless children and an indictment of the housing policy of this government.
In the first place, MKN Properties should not have sold these houses to Ryanair. Ordinary people never had a chance against the financial might of a corporation like that. Selling houses to Ryanair in the middle of a housing crisis is like selling food to a speculator in the middle of a famine.
The wider context is the government’s housing policy. Their number one priority is to make life easy for developers and landlords – access to the strategic investment fund for building, tax-free profits for big landlords and subsidies and schemes that keep rents and sale prices sky-high. From beginning to end, this government’s housing policy does everything for the already wealthy at the expense of ordinary people locked into endless renting or mortgages”.
Ollie Power said: “MKN Properties is currently building a large apartment block at Hollytree house. We say to them: don’t repeat the mistake of selling to a large corporation. These properties and the 25 vacant homes need to be taken into public ownership and made available to people on the housing waiting list. We will be asking local people to sign our “Homes for Need” petition: bit.ly/4ep8JpD.
People Before Profit offers a real housing alternative: a state construction company, banning vulture funds and corporate landlords, banning evictions, banning shabby bulk-buying deals such as the Ryanair sale, a punitive vacant sites tax, sustained use of Compulsory Purchase Order mechanisms to secure homes for all who need them, a national retro-fitting programme”.
