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

I wish to also express my deepest sympathy to the O'Brien family for the tragic loss of their three children and their sister in Clondalkin yesterday.

Of the homeless families in Dublin, 60% have been in emergency accommodation for more than six months and 40% have been in bed and breakfasts, hostels or hotels for over one year. There are 138 families who have spent more than 18 months in emergency accommodation and 40 families have now entered their third year of homelessness. Many of these families are living in inappropriate, unsuitable and insecure accommodation. As the Tánaiste knows, the number of complaints about the accommodation has doubled. Families are being forced into accommodation with damp rooms, bloodstained sheets, mice and even cockroaches. Can the Tánaiste, or any Member, imagine living with young children in these conditions for this length of time? Some of the 2,500 homeless children have spent more of their lives in emergency accommodation than in a stable home. Meanwhile some 198,000 homes lie vacant across the State. In Dublin, 40,000 homes are empty, which is almost 40 houses for every homeless family. This is not new information because we have known about it since the 2011 census, the same year the Tánaiste took office. Yet for five years during which the previous Government was in office, the Tánaiste did nothing to bring these homes back into use. That is why 1,200 families and 2,500 children are sleeping in emergency accommodation. It is also why there are 100,000 households languishing on the councils' waiting lists and why thousands of families who are facing home repossessions or spiralling rents are now at risk of homelessness.

The Government has started to take some action but the plans are not ambitious enough. They are chronically underfunded and they will not meet their targets. The Peter McVerry Trust is hosting a vacant homes conference today. The trust has nine policy recommendations it wants the Government to include in the upcoming vacant homes plan. The Simon Community has published a ten-point plan to tackle the unacceptable number of vacant units. Both of these groups are urging Government to do more to get empty homes back into use. My questions to the Tánaiste are very simple. Will she commit to studying carefully the recommendations of those two organisations? More importantly, will she commit to publishing a vacant homes plan that is ambitious and properly funded to provide the homes so desperately needed by those families in emergency accommodation and by those at risk of homelessness?

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