Pearse Doherty (Donegal South West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I listened to the debate earlier and it is very clear who is to blame. It is every single local authority in the State, it is every single county manager and city manager and it is the councillors who sit there. The Government has provided everything but, somehow, all of these local authorities have colluded to make sure that no houses are built and no houses which are currently not fit for purpose are being repaired. For some reason, they have done all of that with the support of local authority members. It is simply unbelievable.

I would agree with one aspect - and one aspect only - of what I have heard in the last while from the Government spokespersons, namely, there is no quick-fix solution to this crisis. This crisis will take time to resolve. However, there are things that can be done immediately that will help to solve the situation we are in. We have heard from the Government backbenchers about there being no quick-fix solutions. It is as if they came to office just yesterday when they are in their fifth year of Government.

This is a crisis that did not happen overnight. We did not all wake up one morning and find there were thousands of people homeless and hundreds living on our streets. It did not happen overnight. It was pointed out time and again by agencies and by people working at the coal face in dealing with these issues that this was going to happen. At budget time every year, when I talk about those who are homeless, I have stated that the budget measures the Government has brought in will make the situation worse. It is very clear that the policy of this Government is to accept the fact of homelessness. It cannot cut capital spending in the way it has done and pretend there would be no homeless crisis. The Government parties went into this with their eyes wide open.

The Government talks about a six-year plan of €3.8 billion to try to resolve some of this problem, although it will only house a third of those who are currently on the waiting list. I recall one of the first decisions the Government made when it entered office. It was made on 31 March 2011 - the Government did not need a six-year plan then. It was on just one day that it handed over €3.1 billion to the bondholders of Anglo Irish Bank, to the poor craters who invested in the broken bank and got paid 100% by the Government. Yet, the Government cannot scrounge up enough money to deal with the crisis that has been happening on its watch for the past number of years and prior to its entry into office. The fact is that the Government has been tolerating homelessness.

There are things that the Government can do. As finance spokesperson, I see it all the time in terms of how the Government has bowed down to the banks, how it has allowed the banks to evict people from their houses time and again and how it has weakened the code of conduct on mortgage arrears. In recent weeks the Supreme Court ruled that it need only take one part of that code of conduct into account when dealing with repossessions, that is, the fact that there cannot be repossessions within the moratorium period. When I brought forward legislation in this House to put the code of conduct on a statutory basis, however, the Government said it was not needed because the code was sufficiently robust. Again, Sinn Féin has been proven correct.

The homelessness crisis and the housing crisis can be ended. However, politics is all about choices. In the last budget the Government decided to put more money into the pockets of the wealthiest people. At the same time, some Government Deputies, when they come to Dublin, spend the night in hotels where families are now being accommodated. They are aware of the pain and the suffering this is causing those families, and some Members have told very humane stories about how it affects children and will affect children well past the time when all of us have left this Chamber in years to come. It is scandalous that they cannot find within themselves the means to declare this a national emergency. When it is declared a national emergency, we can do different things. We can make sure the funding is found; we can make sure that the NAMA properties are used.

This is the despicable thing. The State owns thousands of houses right across the country but, as the Taoiseach has said, NAMA is there to make a profit. Of course NAMA is there to make a profit; that is why it was set up. However, we can change the law under which NAMA is governed if we so wish and if we desire to end this crisis. Instead of selling those houses to speculators, we can decide to take them into our ownership and provide them for social housing and the needs of the homeless.

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