Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I have just come from Apollo House where the Home Sweet Home campaign is currently occupying a building which, ironically, was formerly a social protection building. It is probably seven or eight storeys high. There are dozens of activists inside who are making available accommodation to homeless people on the street. Groups such as Simon are in there offering voluntary support services to the homeless coming in. They are asking for public support for this brilliant action. This is a NAMA building, which is now, incredibly, in the hands of receivers, BNP Paribas. It is a public building that could be used to help resolve the homelessness crisis for children and families on the streets and it has taken the direct action of ordinary activists to take hold of the building and do what the Minister should be doing. I suggest that the Minister would go down there, talk to the people, who are serious people, who are taking the sort of serious, radical action that frankly is not being taken here.

It is a crying shame that the Government has refused to change the mandate of NAMA, which has been unloading vast amounts of property to the benefit of vultures and speculators which could help resolve the housing crisis instead of a fairly pathetic attempt to close the door after the horse has bolted in terms of unaffordable rents that are contributing directly to the housing and homelessness emergency. In all seriousness, I ask the Minister to take his inspiration from the Home Sweet Home campaign - the activists, trade unionists, artists and homeless people who are in Apollo House. This is the action we need instead of a set of policies that essentially is about genuflecting before the greed for profit of property developers and landlords who want to profit from the unacceptable, obscene misery of families, homeless people and the thousands of people affected by this disastrous homelessness emergency. It is not a crisis, it is an emergency and this is not the emergency action we need.

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