Dessie Ellis (Dublin North West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The then responsible Minister, Deputy Jan O’Sullivan, even promised to put one in place while rejecting a Sinn Féin amendment to the residential tenancies Bill which would have done just that. Tenants cannot afford to have their deposits withheld without justification which is now such a common practice that nearly every renter has experienced it at least once. Many renters do not even understand they have a right to their deposit back. Such a scheme would be a massive improvement.

We call for a referendum on the right to housing. The Constitutional Convention overwhelmingly voted to support a referendum on the issue. It decided the right put before the people should be robust and cognisable by the courts. This right has been long denied the poorest in our society. One just needs to look at the recent complaint against the State by the International Federation for Human Rights on behalf of 130,000 residents in estates in inner city Dublin and Limerick. Housing is not a right in Ireland in 2014. Instead, it is a very expensive privilege.

Will the Government take on board these proposals? I am sure the Minister, like me, has many people coming to his constituency clinics, breaking down over the lack of housing or their rent supplement being stopped. I have had countless families coming into my office seeking emergency accommodation. Many of them actually queue up at the hotels offering such accommodation as they are told by the homeless services in their local authority that no places are available. For those who secure hotel emergency accommodation, they find they have no facilities for their children or for cooking and have to leave their accommodation during the day as they cannot hang around the hotel lobby. It is an absolute scandal that we are relying on hotels to provide emergency housing. We must be more imaginative in how we tackle this problem.

We raised concerns about the housing assistance payment, HAP, during the most recent debate on housing legislation but the then Minister responsible, Deputy Jan O’Sullivan, prevaricated. We identified that anyone who availed of HAP would be taken off the housing waiting list because they would be considered to be adequately housed. The Minister of State responded to our concerns by saying they would be put on the transfer list. The reality is that anyone on the transfer list will not be considered eligible for social housing for two years. Some local authorities do not even have a transfer list. The Minister was misinformed in this regard.

Schemes which allowed people to make a financial contribution towards senior citizen local authority accommodation seem to have fallen off the radar with many local authorities suspending them. Now, there are waiting lists in most local authority areas with people who want to go into senior citizen accommodation. As much of this accommodation consists of bedsits, financial contributions made by applicants could help in converting them into double accommodation, as is happening in some of the schemes in my area. There are options to get extra housing that we need to look at more carefully.

I know the Government made much play about dealing with social housing voids. The voids were a natural progression in our system. If a person died or for whatever reason left their local authority house, the next person in line got it. Unfortunately, the number of empty local authority houses in such cases built up over the years because of a lack of funding to renovate the void after it was vacated. We need to get back to the roll-on effect with people getting housing in such circumstances and not building up voids.

Landlords the length and breadth of the country are putting up the prices of their rental properties. In many cases people are ending up homeless or looking for another rental supplement to match these increases. This is impossible in the Dublin area. That is why we have called for rent controls but the Government has refused to introduce them.

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