John Halligan (Waterford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

It is arrogance beyond belief. It is contemptuous. It is arrogance personified. It is appalling.

When I was mayor of Waterford three years ago, a young couple whom I have known since they were 15 years old came in to me and said they had lost their house. The week before that they had sold their television and a few weeks before that they had sold their car to try to keep their house. The banks did not listen and put them out of their house. The girl collapsed on the floor, which the ushers in Waterford City Council can confirm, and had to be helped and given tea and water. I met that girl a few weeks ago and she is destroyed because she has lost her house and is still in rented accommodation. If the Minister of State saw the appalling accommodation she is in, it would make her sick.

The Minister of State calls herself socialist and left wing. She is not, because she has not met people who are dying while they are living because of the conditions in which they live. The Minister of State has no compassion. She can shake her head all she likes. The Government side of the Chamber is empty while we discuss housing, while people are sleeping in cars, crying and becoming ill, while children are becoming disabled and 200,000 children are living in poverty. The latest statistics report that one in five children are living in poverty. The Government should call an election, fall and be put out of office because of how it has treated the 90,000 people on the housing lists. Everybody here would welcome an election even if we lost our seats because the Government would be put out of office, and deservedly so because of the contemptuous way it has treated people.

Decent people in the Labour Party, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil would agree that when we leave this Chamber on Thursday or Friday and return to our constituencies, our advice centres will be inundated with housing cases, including homeless people, people in poor housing and people not able to get rent allowance or who are waiting four or five months for it. Can the Minister of State imagine the despair in which people live? At the beginning of time, when man and woman settled, the two necessities for survival were a house and something to eat. In 2014 more people than ever are homeless and on the housing list, 200,000 children are hungry and nearly a quarter of our population are unemployed and hungry. Those are facts, and the Government's answer is to have two Deputies in the House - one in the Chair and the Minister of State. It is outrageous. I am disgusted. I do not want to say anything else.

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