Ruairi Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

It is only a week since I was in here having done what everyone usually does, namely, checking daft.ie. At the time, there were 15 houses available in Dundalk. There are now eight. I look through the rents and I see €1,650 and €1,900. These figures are crazy. I do not know how anybody could contemplate or put the money together in relation to that. I note there is a house with a considerable amount of bedrooms renting for €3,000. I do not know I could have told somebody a number of years ago that one could be paying that sort of money to rent a house in the Dundalk area. I am sure I could have told people that but I am fairly sure they would have laughed at me. Unfortunately, that is not the case.

I spoke to the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage last week. I said that this is an absolute brutal emergency situation and asked when will we deal with it like it is. What we are getting is bit operations, piecemeal actions. We are more inclined to put money into the pockets of developers than get down to building.

The House will be aware of the Sinn Féin proposals in relation to the building of 20,000 public houses. We are talking about cost-rental, council and affordable houses. When we are talking about affordable, we are talking about what really is affordable. We know that we are in an even tighter circumstance, that people are even in a worse situation because of the eviction ban being pulled.

The eviction ban was pulled as the Minister was cobbling together the tenant in situscheme, etc. The bit I could never understand is that the Minister did not even have his ducks in a row. I accept that Louth County Council is processing a considerable number of houses. That is not necessarily the case in every local authority, and there still are issues. There should not be issues at this stage. We need to ensure that there are not and that the absolute necessary is done to help people who are in a really bad circumstance because of multiple failures on the part of Government over many years to build and deliver houses. If we deal with the crisis in the housing sector, there are multiple crises within that.

We are all aware of the issues. As regards housing, we talk about people with disabilities. We talk about older people. We talk about adaptation grants. We talk about disabled persons' grants. Councillor McGeough, from my party, who would do a considerable amount of work, particularly in the mid-Louth area, was given the following message by Louth County Council:

... as has been the practice in previous years – I am now suspending receipt of applications for the various [disabled person's grant] DPG scheme due to the vast over subscription which exceeds both budgets and capacity to manage and process applications.

That means there is a huge need out there. I know of circumstances where people have been able to qualify for grants and the grants have not covered the necessary works to be done. I am dealing with a number of issues with the Minister of State at the Department of Health, Deputy Rabbitte. In fairness, we are trying to circumvent the rules to try and facilitate people. However, here it is the case that we are not looking at delivering on the need that is out there. It is an abject and absolute failure. I have written to the Minister. I hope I will see some sort of action because this is not acceptable in any way, shape or form. As I say, we are talking about elderly people and telling them to come back, apply next year and maybe they will get it two years after that. We do not know what heartache we will put people and families through. The whole idea of this is to improve people's quality of life. The whole idea is to facilitate them staying in their family homes.

Unfortunately, we do not have a Government that is able to offer the necessary solutions, whether we are talking about rents or about housing in general. Many of my colleagues have already spoken about the Sinn Féin policy proposals that we really need to see put in place. We are talking about absolute rental chaos and calamity. Could we not just say we need, at the very least, to completely stall any increases? We are dealing with a brutal set of emergency circumstances. Could we not look at putting a month's rent per year back into renters' pockets? Looking at the type of figures I see on daft.iefor Dundalk and Drogheda - and that is before we get to those for this particular city - I really cannot fathom how people are able to get the money on a day-to-day basis to keep roofs over their heads. The reality is that in some cases they cannot do so.

This circumstances have been made a million times worse by the eviction ban being lifted without the necessary supports being put in place. Those of us who have talked to homeless services, like I have in Louth County Council, are told that it is absolute chaos and that those involved are hoping that we can get through the gap. My office is dealing with nothing but issues relating to people who are under pressure. Imagine how bad this would be if all the elected representatives were not doing their little clientelist fixes.

See this speech in context