Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Independent) | Oireachtas source

Section 37 goes to the heart of this. It was said by Deputy Cowen that this needs to be revised because it is a mistake. The problem is it is not a mistake. The Minister of State is here doing the bidding of Fine Gael and it is leaving her here. It is not a mistake. It is a very deliberate political action that is going to fundamentally change the landscape of social housing now and into the future.

It is appalling because what the Government is doing is abandoning people on housing waiting lists to the markets. It is abandoning them to their own devices to find accommodation, to plead with landlords and for those landlords to then engage with the local authorities. If people would not do this for the higher amounts that were allowed under RAS, for the life of me, I cannot figure out what landlords are going to suddenly appear who will present themselves to the local authorities around the country and offer themselves for hundreds of euro less a month than they can get in market rents, particularly in the large urban areas.

We are going to leave people very vulnerable. I handed the Taoiseach a list yesterday of a dozen people in my area as case studies of the kind of issues people face every day. One woman has a new baby and she was actually out looking for accommodation while she was in labour. She still has not been housed and she cannot register her baby because she is of no fixed abode. She is just a normal person, trying to live. She has been renting for several years and has been on the housing list for six or seven years. Every one of these people suffers because the rents in the area are hundreds of euro above the rent caps. Yet, these people are being told to go and find accommodation that simply is not there.

When this section is read side-by-side with what is intended in regard to the amount of money that is going to be provided, it is clear people are going to have to scrap for substandard accommodation because there simply will not be anything available, certainly in the short term. This is not just a policy about people finding temporary accommodation. This is about the social conditions under which children in this country are going to be reared into the future, when there will be no certainty. We will not even be able to plan school accommodation because people will have to keep on moving as the landlords decide they want their houses back, for whatever reason. This is a social disaster that the Minister of State is proposing and I do not believe it is an accident.

I said yesterday that housing authorities will now become housing support agencies but that would be in a very minimalist way. The person will have to go and find the accommodation themselves. It will no longer be a situation where somebody on a housing waiting list will ever aspire to having a home. They may well get temporary rented accommodation but it will not be a home. That has profound consequences.

I believe this is a seminal moment. This is a day we will look back to and say it was the day the mistake was made, and this Minister of State will be the one who is referred to. She must go back and revisit this. It is absolutely unacceptable.

One of the bright things that happened in the last year and a half was when President Michael D. Higgins went to the European Parliament and set out a vision for the kind of social Europe we should have. We are included in that Europe. It was a day when we should all have been very proud. He referred widely to Jürgen Habermas, the German philosopher who had talked about how the German Government was insisting that the priority was about stabilising budgets but doing so at individual state level, where it was going to be at the expense of social security systems, public services and collective goods. That is exactly what has been happening. It is so much Frankfurt's way, and this is so much about the markets and a market-driven response to something that has serious social consequences. If the Minister of State subscribes to the principles the Labour Party was set up under, she cannot allow this situation to arise where people, including very vulnerable people, are being effectively abandoned to the markets.

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