Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail)
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I thank the Minister of State for attending. It is important that he has done so. I also thank him for the succinct speech he made. There are a number of issues I would like to raise that the Minister of State might be able to deal with.

There is a high rate of family formation. In other words, there is a growing number of Traveller families who need houses. One of the challenges we face, looking at the figures, is that the while the Minister of State has told us how many people have been housed, he has not told us the demand. He said there are 27 new group housing units and eight halting site units. He said there have also been 32 housing acquisitions for homes for Travellers. Are the group housing units and halting site units replacements that will allow families to get better accommodation rather than new spaces, if the Minister of State understands? Will the 32 houses be used to rehouse Travellers? That does not deal with the issue of rapid family formation. We need more detail in that regard because we must tackle that issue.

Something like 50% of the people who are homeless in Galway, those in emergency accommodation, are Travellers. That statistic shows the Minister of State the scale of the challenge we face. I am sure the figure in other areas is similar. If a Traveller wants to go into standard accommodation, that is fine. If an equal choice is given of Traveller-specific accommodation, that is fine. I do not think we should be directing where people go. We should be accommodating people's personal choices.

There is one thing I do not find satisfactory. As a TD for Mayo, I am sure the Minister of State finds the same problem. It is hard for Travellers to get the housing assistance payment, HAP. The rental accommodation scheme, RAS, is not really a player anymore but it is very hard to get HAP. Travellers find it very difficult. A HAP tenancy is very precarious. Many of the people who come to me looking for houses are Travellers availing of HAP. Those are not cases in which there has been any issue. The landlords or owners of the properties are perfectly happy with the tenants but want the property back and that is their issue.

The Minister of State said that in 2019, there were 4,461 Traveller households in local authority and approved housing body, AHB, accommodation and that this number grew to 5,569. That is an increase of 25%, but my question is, having done that, how long is the queue of people still waiting for accommodation across all sectors? How many of those on HAP are on the permanent transfer list to get away from HAP and into local authority accommodation? That is the real measure of where we are.

I will move to something that this committee is fed up hearing me talk about. To me, it is the most solvable problem. The Minister of State could make an executive decision and solve it once and for all within a week. The issue to which I refer is the caravan loan scheme. I cannot understand why it is so hard to crack. At the moment, the Department decides, but I do not know how, to make a finite allocation of caravan loans available in a year. We need to do an assessment of all the deficient caravans on halting sites and in which Travellers are living because there must be nothing worse. I have a few grandchildren who tried camping out for a night. By midnight, they were back in the house. That was in the middle of the summer. There must be nothing worse than living in a poor-quality trailer in the wintertime. I have raised this issue time and again in the Dáil and at the committee. We clearly require a needs assessment of how many caravans it would take to bring the situation up to date. We also need to decide what shelf life we expect a trailer, as Travellers prefer to call them, to have. What is the shelf life of a trailer? We should have a rolling programme to replace them as they move beyond their usable lives.

The next step I cannot get my head around is one that the Minister of State mentioned, thankfully, which I hope is a signal that he will make progress on the issue. There is a limit of €40,000 but one cannot buy a new trailer for €40,000. We are buying problems from the start because we are buying second-hand trailers. When we are talking about living in them 365 days per year, trailers only have a certain life cycle. If you buy a three-year-old trailer and the life cycle of a brand new trailer is, for argument's sake, ten years, now you only have seven years for your money. Would it not be better to get a brand-new trailer that would last for ten years? We need to consider that.

The first issue that arises in this regard is the needs assessment. Everybody who needs one should get one. Money is not so scarce that this problem, which is finite, could not be solved in one year. If the cost was going to run to millions, I would understand but that is not the case.

The next issue is the €500 deposit. Somebody who is not a Traveller rang me yesterday looking for an exceptional needs payment from the Department of Social Protection. That person was asked to make up their weekly expenses. We started doing a doodle. We put in the cost of food for this person, who is single. We included the cost of food, heat, light, clothes and some social expenditure, including the cost of the odd newspaper. This person is parsimonious. We included the cost of running a 15-year-old car and so on. From the €232 available, nothing was left. How are families whose only income is welfare meant to save up this €500 deposit? I received a reply to a parliamentary question. It was the kind of reply I find awkward. It stated that the €500 deposit is needed but that it is at the discretion of the local authority to collect it or not in the circumstances. Why make life so complicated? In Galway, there were four caravan loans issued. Therefore, the total amount of money raised was €2,000. The budget of Galway City Council is €50 million or whatever. Can we bit a little generous for once in our lives and do the simple thing? We should provide new caravans for all, get rid of the deposit and have a modest fixed loan repayment, taking into account that some people are also paying rent on the bay and on the little service unit. In some cases, people also get a kitchen unit.

We need to be realistic about this and give people a modicum of comfort. The numbers are small. As the Minister of State said, the numbers in halting site accommodation account for a fraction of the cost of the housing budget of any county council or the Department. I am glad that notice is being taken of the committee. We are trying to be very targeted and reasonable in what we are looking for. We want to work in co-operation with the Department, but we have to be very firm on easy wins and solutions that would mean people would go to bed in midwinter with a modicum of comfort being delivered now and not going from year to year.

If anybody else was living in this kind of accommodation, RTÉ would be down with the cameras. I remember a certain group was given top-class accommodation in Army tents. I rang up a certain major radio station, that being RTÉ, and said that if it was so worried about the state of people's accommodation, it should do something on the very poor caravans in which people have been living for years. It was not interested. That is RTÉ's business, but it is our business to be interested. I know the Minister of State is interested. Unfortunately, he is in at the tail-end of the lifetime of the Government. Whichever way it goes, there will be an election by 20 February. The Minister of State could sort out the caravan loan scheme in one go between now and then. It must be too tempting not to do it. Just go and do it. The officials will make sure it happens. The Minister of State would make a lasting mark if this issue were dealt with once and for all.