Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

As Deputies know, the housing and homelessness crisis is getting worse. Some 130,000 families are on local authority housing waiting lists, many waiting on average ten years before they have the chance of a permanent home. Over 6,000 people are sleeping in emergency accommodation tonight, as the Minister knows, over 2,000 of whom are children.

These figures do not include the large numbers of hidden homeless, that is, people who are currently sofa surfing, living in cramped and overcrowded accommodation with two or three generations of their families or those at imminent risk of homelessness. It also does not include those people who are on waiting lists to get access to emergency accommodation or, as we heard recently in Dublin, the growing number of people who are being turned away by local authorities because apparently they do not have a need for emergency accommodation despite the fact that they have nowhere to go.

There is a crisis in the private rental sector. The average rental price of a family home in almost all parts of Dublin is €1,500 a month. As the Minister said, there are increasing problems in terms of affordability in the owner-occupier sector and increasing numbers of repossessions of buy-to-let and family homes.

None of these figures convey the human side of the tragedy and trauma affecting those people who are homeless or at risk of homelessness today. My colleague, Deputy Mary Lou McDonald, raised a case that I brought to her attention. A young woman from my constituency was made homeless only two weeks ago. She is 18 years old and her partner is 22 years of age, and they have a four month old baby. Nine adults were living in a cramped council house in Clondalkin. As a result of the stresses and strains, that young family found themselves homeless.

When they presented to a local authority they were told to go back to their mother's house and that they did not have a need for emergency accommodation. They insisted on at least being given the freephone number and at 12.30 a.m., standing outside Heuston Station in the freezing cold with their baby, they were eventually accommodated by Focus Ireland's intake team. They spent several nights in emergency accommodation in different parts of the city - one night in Ballsbridge and another in Malahide - but for some unexplained reason they were then told that emergency accommodation would no longer be funded through the system.

Strong interventions from Focus Ireland, the Mercy Law Resource Centre and elected representatives have changed the situation and, thankfully, the family is now in emergency accommodation. They face an enormously uncertain future, in particular in trying to access private rental accommodation. I am referring to this case because we have to ask why this family is homeless. It is not because of anything in their circumstances. Rather, it is because of the simple fact that they, like so many others, cannot access council housing or private rental accommodation.

None of this is an accident. It is the consequence of policy failures over decades from this House and the Customs House. There was a failure to regulate the private rental sector and mortgage lending properly, to manage the owner-occupier sector and, crucially, to provide a sufficient supply of social housing.

The Minister is correct. No one member of the Committee on Housing and Homelessness has argued that the solution rests solely with the provision of social housing. We need an increased supply of private affordable housing for first-time buyers and affordable private rental housing. The sector of the housing system for which the State has most responsibility is social housing. Unless we start to see a substantial increase in the output of social housing available to those most in need, the worst elements of the crisis will continue.

It is also important to emphasise that the provision of social housing does not just benefit those lucky enough to move into it.

It reduces pressure on the private rental sector, bringing down rents for people who choose to live in that sector, and it also assists in reducing pressure on the cost of buying a home for first-time buyers. Substantial increased provision of social housing is good for all sections of the housing system.

When Sinn Féin initially proposed the creation of the Committee on Housing and Homelessness, we did so because of the urgency surrounding the situation that we, like Deputies from all parties and none, face in our constituencies. I am delighted we secured cross-party support and that we did such a significant amount of work. I will not repeat the detail of the work outlined by Deputy Curran, the Chairman of the committee, other than to say all of the Deputies who sat on the committee put in an enormous amount of time to listen to the contributions of those who came to the hearings, to read the approximately 90 submissions, and to consider whether we could come up with new ideas and policy proposals to tackle the problems in our report. The report we produced is a credit to both the Chairman and the members and it outlines considerable challenges and opportunities for the Minister to tackle.

I wish to focus on one issue in the very short time available. I endorse all of the report’s recommendations. I refer to the proposal to have 50,000 social houses over a five-year period. There is no reason for the Government not to prioritise the issue, and for it not to provide, through local authorities, mixed-tenure local authority driven estates. That would be a much more credible proposition than the involvement of public private partnerships of which I heard the Minister speak earlier. I strongly support all of the other recommendations mentioned by Deputy Curran.

I wish to make two concluding sets of remarks. Like Deputy Curran, probably one of the most powerful presentations I attended during the seven weeks in which the committee sat was the meeting facilitated by Focus Ireland with a broad range of people who have experience of homelessness and homeless services provided by a range of providers. Some of those people are in the Visitors Gallery today listening to the debate. They demonstrated huge resilience and courage, but they depend on us in this House to start to tackle the causes of the housing and homeless crisis.

The Oireachtas has produced many reports over the years. The value of those reports is not in the ink on the pages but whether they influenced Government policy and whether that policy improved the quality of people’s lives. If the report the Minister will publish in two weeks’ time does that, he will certainly have my party’s support and we will applaud him for it, but if he does not adopt the priority recommendations in the report in particular, we will hold him to account for continuing the failed policies of his predecessors. The ball is now clearly in the Minister’s court. We wait with expectation for his housing action plan to be published later this month.

See this speech in context