Arthur Morgan (Louth, Sinn Fein)

I support the motion before the House and commend the Labour Party and Deputy Gilmore on giving us the opportunity to debate it because it is an important issue which concerns many of my constituents from across the social spectrum.

As the sometimes technical nature of our debates can cause us to lose sight of these issues, I want to briefly outline one of the eight to ten representations on rent supplement dealt with by my constituency office in Dundalk each week. The case in question concerns a separated 58 year old woman who had been involved in a bad relationship during the almost 40 years she was married. However, she remained in the relationship because she wanted to rear her children and wanted to wait for them to leave home before taking action. When she eventually left the relationship, the family home was sold, with the money from the sale being divided between the couple and the children.

For the past three years, she has lived on her portion of €40,000 with the knowledge that she would hit a brick wall when the money was inevitably spent. She joined a community employment scheme, which provided an income of €218 per week but was paying rent over the three years of €140 per week and, in addition, had to buy furniture because her rental accommodation was unfurnished. When her few bob ran out, she applied for rent supplement but was told that she did not qualify because her rent was more than €100 per week. She was living outside Dundalk because she could not afford the cost of rent within the town, which ranges from €150 to €170 per week. At present, she is entirely dependent on her relatives and adult children for support.

This woman is an example of the failure of this system to serve many people, including some in even worse circumstances. We need to examine the system and make urgent changes. The bottom line is that Government policy forces women in particular to remain in dreadful and sometimes violent situations. They cannot escape their situations because of the rental trap.

A number of Government Deputies, and Deputy O'Connor in particular, likened the €400 million per year cost of private rental supplement to a black hole but nothing is being done to change the system. The provision of adequate numbers of social housing units is the only viable solution. Deputy Gilmore outlined the statistics and described the Government's disastrous record on this issue. The National Economic and Social Council, NESC, correctly states that 73,000 units of social housing will be required by 2012, yet the Government has no strategy in place to achieve that objective.

The Minister of State regularly pats his Department on the back and claims that it is doing wonderfully and, in a similar vein, the Government amendment boasts that it facilitated "the 11th successive year of record house completions through the addition of 80,954 in 2005". If "bullshit" is considered parliamentary language, that is the appropriate term for that because only 5.8% of those 80,000 houses comprised social housing. How can the Minister of State pat himself on the back for presiding over such a scandalous and disastrous record?

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