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

I want to add my voice of support for Deputy Pearse Doherty's amendment on the issue of vacant tax. The urgency of a vacant unit or vacant home tax simply cannot be overstated. Let me put a human face on this matter because often, when we debate financial matters, one only hears dry figures, statistics and so on.

I have a long litany of cases that people in dire circumstances bring to my office every single week. This week, a young woman in her early 20s came to my office. She has been homeless with her young child for two and half years. Her child is now five and half years old. They have been housed in eight different emergency accommodations, including the Clondalkin Sonas homeless accommodation where there was a fire. As the Minister will know, one mother and three babies were killed due to the fire. The young woman who came to my office had been in that hostel and she was very close friends with the woman who died. She is completely traumatised, as is her son. She is still in emergency accommodation. Her son is now in his third school in two and half years. They are utterly traumatised and they have no idea when they will be housed. The signs are, given the state of the list operated by the Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council, it could be years. The woman broke down several times in my office. She is completely unable to cope. She blames herself, she thinks she is a terrible mother for putting her child in this situation and pleaded for a secure roof over their heads.

Side by side with that, close to the emergency accommodation that she is in now, and I highlighted this case before but I suspect that it is the tip of the iceberg, I highlighted recently a block of apartments in Sandyford. I refer to the Robin Hill apartments in Balally. The apartments have been owned by NAMA since it was set up. NAMA has sat on between 15 to 20 empty units since it took them over the loan of the developer. Recently, NAMA sold the properties to a vulture fund that tried to evict the rest of the tenants. All the while, between 15 and 20 apartments have been left empty while people like the young woman and her child I referred to and so many others go through a housing trauma. Could there be anything more urgent than putting human beings, like that young mother and her child, into those empty apartments? For ordinary people, it is as simple as that. It is obscene that NAMA sat on those empty apartments. It is worth saying that the Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council approached NAMA and asked for the apartments but NAMA said no. The apartments are still empty while there are people like the young woman I mentioned going through hell.

It seems to me that we should set aside the very interesting debates on whether there are 180,000 empty units, as the CSO suggests, or a percentage of that figure. I do not know whether the percentage is 10%, 20% or 30%. We have to find out the correct figure, as a matter of urgency. There are no debates about probate or anything like that but there may be a debate about what conditionality should have been put on the off-loading of NAMA assets or whether NAMA assets should ever have been off-loaded in the teeth of a housing crisis like this one. Either way it is simply unconscionable that there are perfectly habitable empty units that people like the young woman and her child that I mentioned could live in. Instead, she is breaking down as a human being. The damage that has been done to her child is impossible to fathom or calculate.

Deputy Pearse Doherty has tried to inject urgency into this question, which I echo. I wish to add that it is just not good enough if the Government does not move, as a matter of absolute urgency, to ensure that not a single unit that could be inhabited by people who are at the sharp end of this appalling housing emergency. I urge that any obstacles to getting people housed in these empty units are removed, as a matter of urgency. Whatever measures that have to be taken and whatever taxes or penalties that have to be imposed in order to get those properties for the people who need them must be taken, and they must be taken now, because we have talked about this matter for years.

The amendment is a very modest effort. It must operate within the constraints of the Finance Bill and what we are allowed to propose. We cannot propose things that result in a charge on the Exchequer. The amendment seeks to compel the Government to do something about the obscenity of empty units sitting side by side with human misery and human tragedy. I appeal to the Minister to take the amendment on board and do something about this matter.