Matt Carthy (Cavan-Monaghan, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

If I may, I will give a sense of what I am talking about. We will take a married couple, where the husband is one of the hardest workers one could ever meet and who bursts himself and is out day and night trying to look after his family. His wife is a carer for one of the children and is at home. They are crippled by rent. Every single year their rent goes up. I have lost count of the number of places they have had to move to. They have been to every single financial institution imaginable trying to see if there is some mechanism by which they can own their own home. It is a no-go and yet, the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage says they are not in need of housing because they earn in the region of €40,000. They would be ideal local authority residents. One must remember that there is often an insinuation that people who are in local authority houses somehow get a free house. They pay rent in line with and relative to their income and it is far from a free house. At the moment the only people who are getting free houses are the developers and the speculators who are drawing down this year €479 million in HAP payments. This system is absolutely rotten and needs to be changed.