Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I welcome everyone here. I also welcome this discussion because there is no more urgent discussion to have and I hope it will lead to action and policy change.

Do the delegations categorise the current situation as a crisis? I want to know because one cannot begin to address the problem unless one alerts people to how serious it is. Maybe the problem is more acute in my area than in other areas. Deputy Catherine Murphy has alluded to the fact that the problem is very bad in Kildare and we have heard testimony from Limerick and so on. I would describe the problem in Dún Laoghaire as an emergency because I have never seen anything like it. The staff in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown council have been completely overwhelmed by what is going on. My office has become an extension of the welfare, homeless and housing departments of the Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council with the arrival of a number of families in dire circumstances. I have never seen a situation where the council literally says to people, "We do not know what to do. We have nowhere to put you." That is how bad it is. If we are going to force the issue on to the Government's priority agenda then we need to name it as a crisis. Do the delegations agree with me that this is a crisis?

The Peter McVerry Trust alluded to the fact this crisis did not start in the past two or three years and that a build-up to the problem was already apparent during the boom. I wholeheartedly concur with its view. Housing has always been the biggest issue for me and accounts for about 80% of what I deal with. The problem has got severely worse but it has always been the biggest issue for me.

In terms of a starting point for dealing with the matter, it is important that we recognise there has been a market failure in terms of the provision of affordable and social housing. Do the delegations agree with me?

I am worried by the fact that the Taoiseach still talks about the issue in terms of the need for 25,000 houses to be provided per year. I am worried by the fact that he has not made a distinction between commercial and for-profit provided housing and affordable and social housing which, in my opinion, are two very distinct things. Do the delegations agree with me? I do not believe that the for-profit market can resolve the problem. As the McVerry Trust has stated, the government did not resolve the matter during the boom and the problem has worsened since the bust. The idea that the market can deal with the problem is, to my mind, fantasy in the extreme. The distinction has not been spelled out in the responses received from the Government on the nature of the crisis. I would like the delegations to comment on the matter.

Can we start to name figures for what needs to be done? We had a drama concerning numbers in the Dáil when we discussed the matter. When we said the budgets were being cut the Government replied this was not the case and that new money was now available for social housing and so on. Then one looked at the figures and was left wondering. The latest figure to emerge is 400 which means we will have 400 new houses. How many social and affordable houses do the delegations think we need? I do not mean the general provision of housing supply. How many social and affordable houses do we need? It is our opinion that we need 10,000 per year for five years minimum in order to deal with the crisis.

There are short-term and long-term characteristics to the crisis which were spelled out by the organisations. What will we do in the short-term? I direct my questions first to the McVerry Trust and then Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council, in particular. What can we say to the families who live in diabolical and unacceptable conditions? I am dealing with many of them and know that the council is very familiar with them also. What can we do? What has to be said and done to get people out of dire situations? Nobody should have to drag their kids ten or 15 km across a city, as is currently happening. Do we need a policy whereby a person, for example, in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown is not sent to another administrative district for emergency accommodation? That should be the case and is self-evident.