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

Bureaucratic manipulation of figures to meet targets is a feature of Stalinist dictatorships and tin-pot regimes. That is what we saw with the re-categorisation of figures in March and we should desist from trying to meet targets through such manipulations. That also matters for the Opposition. I am fed up hearing that we have to get everybody out of hotels. I am aware of families that I would like to get into hotels because there are no hubs or council houses available. That is another target we want to meet or not meet. I am glad to hear the Minister say there is nobody who does not have a place because I am dealing with two families. A woman with three children, including an infant, is wandering around the streets of Dún Laoghaire as we speak. She has been told there are no hotels available and there are no hubs. If there is a place for everybody, please offer her a place and please do not offer her a place infested with drug users and people with alcohol or other problems.

I ask the Minister about another family I am dealing with who have six children. To give the background, they have been on the housing list for 15 years. I hear people rightly being critical of being eight years on the housing list but this family have been on the housing list for 15 years . They have been in 15 different precarious types of accommodation, including HAP so-called social housing, in the past 15 years. They were pushed out of the Clayton Hotel where they had been staying since March because it is filling up for the summer, as are many of the hotels. Last night, the family was split into three different components because there was nowhere to go, and they do not know where they are going tonight either. I hope the Minister can help them as he has said on the record here that there is a place for everybody. I will expect those two cases to be resolved this evening.

Other forms of manipulation of figures include knocking people off housing lists because their income is slightly over the threshold even though there is absolutely no accommodation for them. I told the Minister of State, Deputy English, in the Dáil a couple of weeks ago about three cases I am dealing with where people got a little bonus on their salary, who did a little extra overtime or whose income very marginally went over the €35,000 threshold. They have been taken off the list, in some cases having been on it for ten or 15 years. That is manipulation of the figures because there is no solution. If there was an actual functioning affordable housing scheme for those who were thrown off lists I would say, "Yes, maybe" but that should not be allowed. Those people should be put back on the list immediately until there is something else available. I would like a response to that because at the moment there is nothing for that group of people and it is wrong to throw them off the list.

On the emergency aspect, I want to make a serious proposal. With the hotels filling up for the summer we are in a dire situation. There are no hotels available in many cases, particularly at the weekends. We need immediate action on that. I have two proposals. First, we need extra staff and resources provided in each local authority whose job is to spend the entire day phoning around for accommodation. Families who are dragging around three, five or six children should not be expected to spend half the day on the phone trying to find accommodation that does not exist. I propose we have properly resourced teams who will get on the phone the moment those people present and find them somewhere to stay. Second, we need teams of people who will walk around the towns in the affected areas physically looking at every empty property and approaching the property owner and saying, "What is happening with that property?". I can tell the Minister that in my area now there are at least 30 units sitting empty that I can name and provide him with the addresses. In fact, there are over 30. There are 25 in Robin Hill, which I have mentioned in the Dáil several times. The Robin Hill apartments are in the hands of Cerberus. They have been sitting empty for about three or four years. I am sick to my back teeth with this because that could solve some of the emergency cases. They were sold to Cerberus by NAMA and it is just sitting on them. Similarly, St. Helen's Court in Dún Laoghaire is owned by Apollo Global Management, another vulture fund. It is de-tenanting the complex. There are four or five empty units there at the moment. The Minister should give the local authority the power to go down there and say, "What are you doing with those units? We are taking those units". I do not care what has to be done. Whatever powers or emergency legislation is necessary to empower the local authorities to make those units available for people should be put in place.

Lastly, for six or seven years I have been campaigning to get council houses built on the Shanganagh site and this game of Ping-Pong is still going on between the Department and the council. We hear that it is up to the council to come up with a plan and the council says it cannot get the funding from the Department. It is just Ping-Pong and nothing happens. People from the Minister's Department who are empowered to make decisions should meet the Deputies, councillors and those officials in the council who can actually make decisions. They could sit down for two, three or four hours or whatever is necessary to identify the blockages to getting that site moving. I personally believe the blockage is the Minister's insistence on having the private sector in some way involved. If I am wrong, let us find out with a proper sit-down instead of the Ping-Pong that has been going on for years.