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

I thank Ms Leilani Farha and Ms Julieta Perucca for their presentations. I thank Mr. David Joyce, Ms Sinead Kerin and others from the Mercy Law Resource Centre for their great work, as well as for often looking at and assisting with the cases that flow through my door of people facing the consequences of the current housing crisis. I thank Ms Leilani Farha for her intervention over the past several days. I attended her speech at the Simon Community event yesterday and everything she said was extremely welcome. I hope the Government is listening.

Obviously, some committee members are fully behind this proposal. Both Deputy Ó Broin and I have put forward Bills on changing the Constitution to put the right to housing above property rights. Deputy Pringle sought to bring in the covenant on economic and social rights. In all cases, the Government voted them down, as did Fianna Fáil. The concern for property rights is the issue. To my mind, that sets out the landscape with which we are dealing. We will keep on going and, hopefully, these interventions today will help push us in the right direction.

Ms Leilani Farha made a point yesterday which would be useful to draw out here. If human rights were being breached in respect of, for example, torture, then there would be an immediate intervention to stop it. It is a useful way of putting it. I believe having families, and children in particular, in a precarious housing situation for years, or in homeless emergency accommodation, or, worse, on the street, is a form of torture.

It would be useful if Ms Farha commented on that. It is extremely damaging to a person's mental and physical health and general well-being and amounts to a form of institutional or State torture when people are being treated in that way. Is that a fair way to put it?

Ms Farha also commented yesterday on the role property speculation is playing in our domestic housing and homelessness crisis and globally. I welcome her comments, not least because I have tabled a motion on this issue which will be debated in the Dáil tomorrow. It would be useful if she were to elaborate on that point because while we often discuss consequences such as the lack of public housing, we do not focus sufficiently on the fact that some people benefit from the torture experienced by those who are affected by homelessness and the housing crisis. There is an inverse relationship between the suffering of the many and the profiteering of the few through property speculation, land hoarding and so on. Does Ms Farha endorse that view?

My motion refers to dealing with the issue of vacant properties. Will the witnesses comment on good examples of countries that have been able to return to use large numbers of empty and vacant properties?

On affordable housing, I believe one of the reasons the Irish Government stubbornly refuses to define the term is that if it were to do so in the way I suspect the witnesses would like it to be defined, that is, related to income and ability to pay, it would have an immediate impact on the private interests of developers. If the State were to set a figure for what is affordable at significantly below the price at which housing can be bought on the open market, property developers or speculators would object. I ask the witnesses to comment on that.

I refer to the inequalities in housing support and the housing assistance payment, HAP, raised by Mr. Joyce. This is a terribly important issue. Mr. Joyce described it in a way that had not fully struck me previously, even though I deal with the consequences every day. Are these inequalities justiciable on the basis that the small difference between the HAP and rental accommodation schemes and the significant difference between those two schemes and local authority housing make all the difference in the world to people who are in housing trouble and cannot afford housing on the open market? When the legislation giving effect to the housing assistance payment scheme was being introduced, I and a number of other Deputies pointed out that the Government's proposal to place responsibility for securing accommodation on the housing applicant would be a disaster, and so it has proved. Would housing applicants have a case before the courts? That possibility has never struck me before. Could someone argue a case on the basis that he or she is receiving a different housing support of lesser quality from the State than a person on the HAP scheme and a support of even lesser quality than somebody who has been allocated a council house? At the moment, the system is arbitrary and ad hoc. There is no consistency as to who will get a RAS or HAP tenancy and who will be allocated a council house. There is no rhyme or reason to the system. Does Mr. Joyce believe legal cases could be taken on the basis of the argument that people are being discriminated against by being offered a lesser form of housing support?