Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú) | Oireachtas source

The housing crisis is hammering practically every element of Irish society. The most directly affected are obviously those people who are homeless, many of those people who are dying on the streets currently. It is also damaging the nutrition, the social skills, the education and the mental health of children who are stuck in emergency accommodation. Then we have tens of thousands of people who are forced to live with their parents, many of them postponing adult life and even having families. Indeed, young people are emigrating in higher numbers due to the fact that they are priced out of life by the Government. Hundreds of thousands of others are hammered due to astronomical costs. Many people are paying the majority of their incomes on rent or mortgages and there are tens of thousands of people who are still on local authority waiting lists, some for well over a decade. Thousands of others are paying crazy interest rates on homes to mortgage companies, vulture funds which the Government has left under regulated to allow them to be hammered through these interest rates as well.

For many parts of the economy, especially in the public service including gardaí, nurses, doctors and teachers, there are people who simply cannot get jobs in the locations where they are meant to be working and this is leading to vast vacancies, left, right and centre in society. Even foreign direct investment is now dodging the country due to the Government's housing crisis. One of the threads or common denominators that ties all of these people together here is Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, which have been at the heart of every one of the key decisions that have led to these problems in the past while.

I have a couple of minutes left and I want to focus directly on the issue of vacancy. Vacancy is an incredible situation in this country, first, in the private sector but most especially in the public sector. My office has been very busy over the summer. We put in 31 freedom of information, FOI, requests across the country. We found that there are 3,500 local authority homes in this country that are lying empty. That is exactly the same number as there is children who are in emergency accommodation in this country. It takes on average eight months to turn around a local authority void to re-let it. In contrast, it takes on average three weeks to turn around private accommodation to re-let. This shows one of the big problems the Government has, and that is the complete inability to deliver public capital projects. The Government is hammered with bureaucracy, red tape and waste. We can see it right from the national children's hospital to the flood defences in the likes of Midleton. Until the Government gets its act together in terms of delivering public accommodation and delivering public capital projects, we will never have the public facilities that we need in this country in the future.

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