Colm Keaveney (Galway East, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The homeless statistics make for grim reading. Over 700 families and over 1,500 children are now living in emergency accommodation. Alongside them are over 6,000 individuals, many of whom have been waiting years in emergency accommodation. The Minister, Deputy Alan Kelly, boasts about his spending on homelessness during his tenure as Minister. This money is not being spent on keeping people in their homes or providing additional social housing.

It has been spent on emergency accommodation. Why happily spend €300 per night to keep a family in a hotel but continue to cap the rent supplement? That is the choice the Government has made. Some families have been placed in hotels, many for significant lengths of time, at a far greater weekly cost than that of putting them up in a private rental home. Rather than raising the ceiling or housing them, the Minister, Deputy Kelly, and his party leader, for some ideological reason, precariously want to leave children in emergency accommodation.

This might be my last comment in the 31st Dáil. The subject of this debate touches on the fundamental principle of why people are in politics. I believed, and have always believed, that politics should be about securing a welfare and a community and establishing a threshold of decency below which nobody should fall. Politics should involve a continual process of bringing people from the periphery into the centre, to give them a chance of equality so that all have a fair chance. Everyone should have the opportunity in life to take whatever talent they have to the very top, in a worthy ethos and with a preference in education. They should be able to have ambition and will. People should get on with their lives and be able to enjoy the fruits of their labour and I wish to give a voice to those who contribute most to secure the social goals to which I have referred.

The subject of this debate is important to every single person in this House.

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