Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I was in the office listening to the spat between the Minister and Deputy Ó Broin, whom I thank for putting forward this motion. It is very important that we focus on this all the time. I would like to respond to a lot of what the Minister said, particularly the idea that the Opposition, who represent local areas, are constantly objecting to local plans. I know the Minister and the Minister of State understand it because they came from being councillors. Going back in their careers, they had a focus on their local areas. First of all, every development that is proposed by every developer is not necessarily suitable to the local area. Along the canal in Drimnagh, where the Luas creeps, there is a huge amount of built-to-rent development taking place, most of it by lucrative development companies and very wealthy individuals. For example, Conor McGregor is building several high-storey apartment blocks along the canal, all built to rent. The council does rent some of them back for council housing not at a level that is reasonable or affordable for the public sector, but at market levels. Then we find that the people who are housed in those complexes by the local authorities are segregated. There is an apartheid process of segregating them and not allowing them to have access to the crèche or the playground area because they are not paying management fees. The Government is saying that when we object to these kind of plans, we are objecting to the building of houses. It is quite the opposite. What we want to see is the building of social and affordable housing that is sustainable in the communities that we serve and know well. That is just one example. There are lots of other examples and I am sure everybody in this House has more of them.

Stuck in the middle of all of this is a cohort of people who are crucial to our economy, including the teachers, the nurses, the public sector workers and the civil servants in this House who earn too much to be on the social housing list but do not earn enough to live in apartments or houses that are costing €2,000 or €2,500 a month in cities like Dublin, Cork and Limerick, where they are meant to be for their jobs. They are being pushed and squeezed out, and many of them are ending up in homelessness. If they lose a tenancy because a landlord wants to sell up and puts them out of their home, they are not on a low enough income to get on the housing list. They do not receive HAP or any other social income supports because their income is too high. Yet, their income is not high enough to be able to afford extortionate rents in the type of dwelling that I described earlier, which are littered all over the place but which are not affordable to ordinary workers and workers we rely on to run society.

When we talk about crises in the public services, they all stem from staff shortages, that is, not getting enough special needs assistants, SNAs, or teachers in the schools, nurses in the hospitals or physiotherapists or speech therapists or administrative workers in the Civil Service. Those crises all lead back to the housing crisis because these workers, who earn what traditionally would be considered a reasonably decent wage and who educated themselves to be able to earn that kind of money, find they cannot live in the cities and the areas from where they come and where they work. This is a real joke on behalf of the Government to say it is dealing with it, and by 2025 and 2026. I am talking about people in the here and now. For example, one woman we know has been in homeless accommodation for four years with her son. She now shares a bed with her teenage son, because he has grown up so much. She shares a bed with her teenage soon and is a public sector worker. In fact, she deals in the sector that looks after children's rights. What sort of state does that to people? It will not give her income supports, she cannot afford to pay the rents and she is not entitled to go on the housing list. I am telling the Minister of State, whether he believes it or not, that there is a huge number of people and families in that squeezed middle who are not being represented.

There was an item on "Morning Ireland" this morning about empty office blocks all over the country. Office blocks are empty, they cannot be rented out and more and more of them are being built. We have a shortage of construction workers. Why does the Government not call in the Construction Industry Federation, CIF, and deal with the developers and tell them that we need the workers in construction to build homes, not office blocks - and by the way, not any more aparthotels and hotels littered all over the inner city. We do not need that. We need homes, that is, real social and affordable homes for people.

Then we have the added problem of the actual social housing stock we do have. The local councillor in Ballyfermot, Hazel de Nortúin, and I drove around Cherry Orchard approximately two weeks ago to have a look at voids. In ten minutes, we identified 24 voids in a small area, Cherry Orchard, that is notorious for its problems. It is notorious for its problems because it has no services. It has no shop, no post office, no dentist or shopping centre and has not had for the past 35 years. There is a chunk of land beside it that is now owned by the LDA. That is public land which the LDA intends developing but it has no intention, if it gets away with it, of negotiating with, talking to, or consulting with the local community and the local services. The LDA has tried to bypass them entirely, and we are fighting it on that at the moment. Included in those 24 voids were four-bedroom units, three-bedroom units - which are like hen's teeth - and bungalows that are adaptable for disability. That is outrageous. In the entire ward there are 62 voids, many of which have lain empty for years. That is outrageous and how are people supposed to get off the housing list that they have been on for a long time, living in overcrowded conditions, if the local authorities react in this way?

People have been fighting for years for proper accommodation. I will take for example Emmet Road, the site of St. Michael's Estate. For 21 years the people there have fought to be listened to in terms of what is needed in the local community. Instead of that they got a massive development of hundreds of apartments, studio apartments, one-bedroom apartments that are not sustainable, and with 24% social housing. In an area that had 100% social housing, it is down to 24%. Nobody is listening to the local communities and that is why there are objections from people like us. Finally, I want to allow time for Deputy Barry to come in and to introduce the addendum we are putting to this motion. We do not want to change it and thank Sinn Féin for putting the motion, but we want to add to it, that is, to reinstate the eviction ban.

In Swords, in the Minister's own constituency, there is a landlord in Applewood, represented by Home Club Limited, which has evicted dozens of families in the past nine months because it can. This is because the new element of extending all new tenancies to be long-term tenancies does not apply to it. They are on six-year tenancies and between now and the next five years, dozens of families around this country could be evicted on that basis. That issue needs to be dealt with. There is lots of shoring up to be done but do not sit there and boast about the housing policy because these are the real, hard facts we are living with and we need the reinstatement of the eviction ban ASAP.

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