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

I thank the Minister of State for taking this topical issue. Last week it was reported that €50 million, required by Dublin City Council to deal with the homeless crisis, had not been paid or allocated to the council by the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government. I spoke to council officials this week and there has been no progress on this. The €50 million in question is €42 million for homeless services and €8 million to refurbish council homes which are vacant. This comes against the backdrop of unprecedented numbers of people becoming homeless, huge demand for emergency accommodation and social housing and a shortage of private rental properties.

Forty new families become homeless a month, mostly due to soaring rent levels which are completely unregulated. There are 1,000 children in emergency accommodation, 150 or so people sleeping rough on the streets of Dublin and over 20,000 unable to find affordable and suitable housing. In regard to housing the only place there is no shortage is the press office of the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government. Every week it seems there is an announcement of money already announced with more details but somehow less actual information. This strategy is to confuse the public and give the media pre-written column inches without any substance in the hope it will not look deeper. It does not need too deep a look as the Government's plan is very shallow indeed. Despite false claims of billions being spent on housing, this is a six year plan for a Government with only approximately six months to live.

What is behind the headline? This Government plans to build just 167 homes in the next two and a half years in this city. This is creative accounting masking callous inactivity. The real figures show less than a third of planned funding for this and the following two years will actually go to real social housing. The rest is a transfer of funding from rent supplement to the slightly different housing assistance payment, HAP, scheme. This Government is doing less and less to provide housing. We need commitments and action on real change; a commitment to increase emergency bed capacity; to maintain 50% housing allocation for the homeless in Dublin; to create a one-stop shop in local authorities for homeless and at risk tenants; to introduce a fair rent system of regulation to end the flow of tenants into homelessness; to invest in building thousands more social houses every year; and to admit that we face a national emergency due to our housing shortage and that serious, strong and even drastic measures are needed to ensure the public good is served and the right to housing protected. Even this morning I saw more homeless people in my offices, once again forced out of the rental market because we have not introduced rent controls or dealt with the soaring prices in Dublin.

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