Seán Fleming (Laois-Offaly, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I asked Mr. McCarthy about the cost of remediating all the legal dumping and that type of legacy issue and if any other legacy issue has arisen in recent times of which the Department, as the Department responsible for the area, should be ashamed. I would say there is one and it is the issue of homelessness. The Department is the organisation responsible for housing. While we have come through a recession, we have come from a position where there was a requirement to have 30,000 houses per annum. We were building more than that number for a few years and we had a surplus and there are unfinished estates and we could talk about that. There are many vacant houses and many of them are being controlled by the banks and they will not let them be sold until their value goes up. The issue of family homelessness and children living in hostels and hotels has occurred in recent times and it was foreseeable for the past two years. If I asked Mr. McCarthy on 1 January 2013, the start of the year under consideration, how many families were homeless in Ireland, I would say the figure was very few, but if I asked him what the figure is today, the number is such that it is a national shame. That has happened and Mr. McCarthy's Department plus one other Department that is responsible for cutting rent supplement has created this issue of family homelessness. It is not all as result of the big bad banks. Some of these people might have been some of Department's tenants because it is as good as any of the banks, as I mentioned earlier, in going to court for evictions. I suspect that if we added up the number of surrenders the Department has had, it would probably be as many as some of the banks.

The Department was not ahead of the curve on this in recent years. When Jonathan Corrie died outside the gates of the national Parliament last year, there was a big drive to act and two buildings were converted. That is a sticking plaster in terms of what is needed. That had to be done but an underlying problem has arisen, not when we were going into or during a recession but when we were coming out of one. There is no excuse for the increase in the incidence of homelessness that we have seen on the streets and in the increase in the number of families with children living in hotels.

The Comptroller and Auditor General just mentioned that there was a €94 million reduction in expenditure on housing in 2013 because somebody did not take up the funding. That was indicative of whatever was happening in the system. We looked at the figures for total expenditure and payments to local government. Current expenditure has remained relatively static but, obviously, the drop has been in capital expenditure, which is on the housing side. Mr. McCarthy cannot be satisfied. The Department, which is responsible for housing, cannot come in here today and say it has done a good job on homelessness. It should not be the issue that it is. It is a new phenomenon that was foreseeable and avoidable. I am not talking about houses in the Shannon region that people do not want. There are good new houses for sale to local authorities priced €60,000 or €70,000 all over the country. Perhaps they are not in Dublin 2 or Dublin 4 but they are all over Ireland. The Department could house any amount of families at the moment for a minimal amount of money. As Mr. McCarthy knows, prices are starting to rise dramatically this year and the Department will be able to buy far fewer houses with the same amount of money next year. Could Mr. McCarthy give me his thoughts? I will revisit this issue because the political and permanent government systems have let the citizens down when it comes to homelessness.