Ruth Coppinger (Dublin West, Solidarity) | Oireachtas source

I would like to raise the topics of homelessness and social housing with the Minister. It is no surprise to me or to many others that the July target for solving the emergency accommodation issue will not be met. The Minister apparently announced €10 million today to move 200 families from hotels and B&Bs into hubs. It seems to me, unless I am interpreting the figures incorrectly, that he is talking about spending €50,000 per family. This equates to approximately one third of the cost of building a house. I ask the Minister to reflect on that for a minute. There are 650 families in emergency accommodation or hotels. Rather than allocating €32.5 million to put them into hubs, why not provide €100 million to build houses for all of them? This follows on from the point about Housing First that was made by a previous speaker.

As someone who deals with many homeless families, I think it is better to be in a hub than in a hotel. We all agree that it is certainly a step up. Families in hubs can cook, enjoy certain facilities and have a bit more security. We all know that there are curfews. It is like a Magdalen laundry-type situation in so far as it involves putting people in collective units. The Minister can shake his head, but I remind him that one of these facilities is an old Magdalen laundry. The point is that it is better than a hotel, but it is not very good in the long term. People cannot bring family members back. People cannot socialise or have a glass of wife. Their way of life is restricted.

Rather than pursuing the hub strategy, why does the Government not try to acquire vacant housing? We all know that there is loads of it in Dublin and all the other areas. We are always told this is never possible until it actually becomes possible. After the Grenfell fire in London, the Tories in Britain suddenly found the money to rehouse families that had lost everything in housing that was lying vacant.

How come they could do that? They could do it because of the political pressure on them to do it and because Jeremy Corbyn has been raising it for a week and there have been protests. We could do the same here but there is no political will to do so.

On social housing, the Minister stated that he went over the target. The targets are a joke. They are obviously too low, otherwise homelessness would not be increasing. Of the 19,000 households that had their needs met across the range of programmes, only 652 were newly built social housing units. That is an incredibly low figure considering there has been an emergency brewing for years.

Dr. Rory Hearne from TASC has made the point, which I am sure the Minister has heard, that in the Dublin City Council area it would take 40 years at the rate things are going to house everybody on the social housing list. It is actually worse in that it is estimated that there are approximately 211,600, or 10%, of households in so-called unaffordable and insecure housing. It is actually double the social housing list. One would be waiting 80 years to sort their problems out.

I will be frank. This is an ideological issue. The Minister must know this is not working for those affected, although it is working for some. It is working really well for the developers, for the elite who are building luxury houses, for example, all over Dublin 15 but mainly in the plush parts of Castleknock where one cannot afford to buy them and where the crisis is not as acute.

The Taoiseach stated he intends to invest more in social housing. How much more? Does the Minister know? How many decades will it take to house all those on the social housing list and in that severe unaffordable and insecure sector I mentioned? That would include a range of different people who have already been mentioned, such as those in direct provision and those in refuges for domestic violence.

On social house building, I doubt it will be dealt with today but maybe the committee could consider undertaking a session on it. The pattern of social house building that has been favoured in recent years is getting private developers to build social housing but the problem with that is twofold. It adds to the cost of a house because the developer has to get a cut, which can be anything from 10% to 20%. In the old days when local authorities were given funding, they could build them directly and it was much cheaper. The other aspect is work conditions. The Minister comes with an interest, and from a background, in finance, and maybe this is a session we could have to go into it in detail and invite in building workers. However, I have good information that there are building workers on the Dolphin regeneration project, for example, for a number of weeks who have been told that they are PAYE workers but who have not yet seen a payslip, have not had any interaction from Revenue and are getting paid in cash or by cheque. We all know building workers have been forced to be entrepreneurs and self-employed. It is a bogus way to operate and the State is losing out massive amounts of revenue which does not seem to be of any interest to it. If this is going on in social house building projects right now, it is real cause for concern. Will the Minister look into it? There have been many instances of it.

What is happening is sub-contractors are being brought in from the North. I have no problem with where a sub-contractor is from but that generally creates a lot of difficulties - Rapid and Malmac being two of them. I heard a joke from a Dublin worker that, ironically, the harder the Brexit, the better for them. The reason the worker said so is because building workers are coming down from the North and driving back up every day. When that happens, it is not good for work conditions and for pay. It is bad that this is going on in projects getting State investment. We had a campaign about welfare fraud but this is fraud as well, if people are not-----