Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail)
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I have been around Departments. So has my colleague here. Normally, a Department would say that a good-quality, brand new caravan was the best long-term investment and then find the evidence of what that would cost before any NGO had to come to it with that evidence. The Department would then put that to the Department of Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Reform. If there is a problem with the Department of Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Reform, we can ask my good colleague, the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage, Deputy Darragh O’Brien, and other parliamentary colleagues to take that up. If people tell us that they cannot get money out of the Department of Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Reform, we would all have to push that Department and call it in to appear before us. However, it does not appear to me that an objective analysis has been done as to how much it would cost – I presume such an analysis was conducted in respect of new housing – to provide a good-quality and new mobile home or caravan for families of various sizes. Until we can get to those granular details, we are affecting people’s lives.

There are other questions that have not been answered. How did the Department decide on a figure of 80 loans? I ask because, again, there does not seem to have been an objective assessment done on the total number of Travellers living in substandard accommodation. I agree that the public do not care. I have evidence of that because when people went on about the tented village in Ennis for the migrants, I contacted a radio programme about it but it did not seem interested even though the issue was being covered by it big time. I asked, "Do you realise we have a lot of Irish people living in really substandard accommodation year in and year out during the summer and winter but nobody seems to get exercised about it?". My belief is that everybody living in this country, whether they came yesterday or have been here for all their lives, is entitled to good accommodation.