Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 6 March 2019

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government

Rebuilding Ireland - Action Plan for Housing and Homelessness: Discussion

Photo of Pat CaseyPat Casey (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The committee has been reviewing Rebuilding Ireland for just short of three years. I want to start with homelessness. I do not need to refer to the famous quote by the former Minister that nobody would be living in a hotel by June 2017, although we are almost two years on from that. However, I want to refer to various quotes from the Minister, Deputy Eoghan Murphy. In May 2017, he said: "I am considering new policy options and responses to ensure that we can quickly realise the target of no new families presenting as homeless being accommodated in hotels". On another date, he said: "...it would seem that the presentation of new families in to emergency accommodation is stabilising." He also stated:

The decrease in the number of adults who are homeless is very welcome. I want to thank our new national director of Housing First for hitting the ground running.

We are seeing an escalation of homelessness year on year, no matter how the Minister presents it. What has happened according to the figures he has given us today? He said 5,100 adults have exited homelessness but homelessness has increased by 526 in the same period. Some 108 adults per week are being declared homeless, or 15 every day, yet the Minister is saying the homelessness crisis is stabilising. I do not know how he can make that out. We are still seeing an increase in the number of families and children on a year to year basis, and because I do not have the figures for how many have exited homelessness, I do not know how many new presentations there are. However, what the Minister is saying is that 5,626 adults entered homelessness in 2018 - they are his figures, not mine.

Pillar 1 of Rebuilding Ireland deals with homelessness. Within this, the Minister has 32 of the 38 actions listed as completed and only six as uncompleted. One of those is rapid build, where only 423 houses have been delivered out of the promised 1,500. It is time to declare that Rebuilding Ireland is failing in regard to homelessness. I appreciate and understand the massive effort that everybody is putting into it but it is not working. Homelessness is not stabilising and, in fact, it is increasing year on year, month on month.

I want to raise several other issues.

I am trying to focus on the tendering process. How many projects have been stalled, cancelled or just stopped because of on-site issues or issues with the procurement process or the contract? How many have not, for whatever reason, been completed? Where does the responsibility for contract approval move from the Department to the local authorities? It is my understanding that much of this happens because a bond is not in place but a project is allowed to commence before it is in place. In my constituency, this has led to a number of contracts being terminated and people are now off site. Is there an issue nationally where a number of projects have been cancelled or stalled because of contractual issues?

I raised short-term letting platforms at my very first committee meeting with the former Minister. I was very disappointed by the presentation we received on the previous occasion because it only dealt with the planning process. It did not deal with the regulation required in respect of the short-term letting platforms and, honestly, we need a combination of both if this is going to work. I have serious questions about the effort and time going to be required from a planning perspective to regulate this sector and how we will ever prove whether a person has been offering short-term lets for less than seven years. If people have been offering short-term lets for seven years, we are precluded from going after them.

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