Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I mentioned earlier that Kildare County Council does not operate a transfer list. A person who goes on the transfer list because he or she is unsatisfactorily housed essentially goes on the council waiting list. If they go on that list today, they get the number for today. If a person who has been taken off the list because he or she is deemed to be satisfactorily housed needs to be placed on that list again two years later, he or she will be placed at the bottom of it. Some of these people may well have been on the housing waiting list for seven, eight, nine or ten years. The fairness associated with the scheme of letting priorities is really going out the window under this approach, which means that people are constantly going to the bottom of the list. I suggest that a transfer list should be introduced. As I have said, not every local authority has a transfer list. Such a list has certainly not been maintained in County Kildare for many years. A variety of things will continue to happen throughout the country unless the Government sets a particular standard for them all to follow.

I will explain why this matters hugely to people. If the Minister of State asks someone who has been on the housing waiting list since 2005 or 2006 whether going off the list and getting a housing assistance payment would compensate them for losing the hope of ever having a home, she will be told that would make them feel like they are renting someone else's property without retaining the hope of ever having a home. There is a world of difference there. Not all of the consequences of the ongoing use of a system that moves children around frequently can be counted from a financial point of view. The consequences for children of having to move away from the support of schools and things like after-school activities that would be normal in most children's lives cannot be quantified in monetary terms. One of the reasons people in this country buy houses is that they really have no other option if they want security of tenure. We need to have a rental option - a third way - that provides security of tenure for people who can afford it. That is a whole other day's work. I do not think this has been thought out. It has certainly not been thought out from the point of view of the 90,000 people on the housing list, the 30,000 people on the rental accommodation scheme and the people who are going to enter the list when they have their houses repossessed. This particular aspect of the Bill is certainly not acting in their interests. I am not disputing it in so far as it relates to the poverty trap.

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