Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)

One of the best ways to protect the children of the State is to provide them with secure housing. In the Visitors Gallery is a small sample of the 96,000 families on housing waiting lists. They are the victims of housing cuts and policies imposed by Labour Party Ministers. Leanne Massey who has four children was recently made homeless because of rent allowance cuts. She is now separated from two of her children and sleeping on a sofa in a two-bedroom house with her grandmother and great-grandmother. Mandy O'Brien, Nicola Lapraku and Elizabeth Martin were all recently made homeless as a result of the reduction of rent allowance caps. Paul Corcoran was homeless for seven years and recently forced back onto the streets. Michelle Murphy spent four years at No. 3 on the medical transfer list. Peter Cleary faces homelessness.

Is it not an obscenity that there are 96,000 on housing lists and waiting up to ten years to be housed, when the census figures show there are 230,000 empty dwellings in the State? Is it not an outrage that we are paying €500 million a year in supplements to private landlords and developers when, if we provided council housing for those on the waiting lists, we would save the State €500 million a year and probably generate another €250 million in rental revenue for the State?

Why is the Labour Party abandoning the policy of direct provision of council housing and, effectively, privatising the social housing market to the benefit of private developers and greedy speculators, the very people who bankrupted the country? What is the Tánaiste going to do for those on the housing lists and in the Visitors Gallery?

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