Aengus Ó Snodaigh (Dublin South Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Ba mhaith liom díriú isteach go háirithe orthu siúd atá gan dídean, nó nach bhfuil aon teacht acu ar tithe inar féidir leo cónaí go leanúnach. Those who are homeless or who are on the homeless list illustrate the chaos and the crisis we face in regard to housing. I heard a Deputy earlier bemoan the fact the motion mentioned Dublin. Dublin is an example of many other urban centres. The crisis in Dublin is at such an appalling scale that we do not want it replicated elsewhere.

I have met quite a number of young families living, if one could call it that, in homeless accommodation, accommodation provided by Dublin City Council's homeless agency. Many of these are young families get up in the morning and must leave that accommodation, whether it is bed and breakfast accommodation, a hotel or a hostel. It is often a hotel room. I mention the level of distress of having to get all one's belongings together every morning and of having to go to reception to see if one is allowed to stay another night or whether one must go to the car park, if one is lucky enough to have a car, to telephone the homeless agency to ask it to telephone the hotel to find out if one can stay. Sometimes people are told they cannot stay at the weekend because there is a wedding and the hotel is booked out.

Often these hotels are not located where the family comes from, so their whole support network is missing. I dealt with a case in recent weeks of a family living in an airport hotel. The family is from the west of the city and the children go to school in Tallaght. This is absolutely crazy. The family is living on social welfare so how are they expected to get from the airport hotel to Tallaght every morning to deliver the children to school? How are they expected to feed those children because one is not allowed to have a microwave in the hotel bedroom? There are no cooking or washing facilities, so the family must depend on takeaways. These particular hotels have no takeaways or launderettes nearby, so they must make bus journeys if they are lucky enough to have the stability of staying in the hotel for one week.

I refer to other hotels which have been contracted to provide these services. One hotel is in such a dilapidated state, it should not be recognised as a hotel. Children are running around the corridors morning, noon and night because they have nowhere else to go. There is no playground or yard and they cannot go out to the front of the hotel because it is on a main road. That is how ridiculous the situation is because this Government and the previous one did not invest in social housing.

In the past, homeless services were mainly aimed at middle-aged single men or single women or at those who had problems with drug abuse, alcohol abuse or mental health illnesses or a combination of all three. What we are finding now, because social housing is not available, is that people who were previously in rented accommodation are ending up on the street because there are no properties in this city - I am talking about this city because it is the one about which I know - under the threshold for rent allowance. I am not an advocate of continuously increasing the rent allowance. I would much prefer, and I have argued for it for ten years, that the money that goes to rent allowance should be spent building social housing for the local authority. That needs to happen but what is happening now is that families cannot access houses or two or three-bedroom apartments on rent allowance. They cannot access it under the leasing arrangement which also subsidises private landlords and which is supposed to be available.

They will not be able to access it when the much promised housing assistance payment scheme comes into being. In the Dublin City Council area the rental accommodation scheme has collapsed totally because landlords are so greedy that they are selling their properties from under their tenants or else refurbishing them and charging higher rents. This is a crisis and it needs to be addressed now rather than in one or two years' time.

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