Joan Collins (Dublin South Central, Independent) | Oireachtas source

Last summer, the Minister with responsibility for housing, Deputy Simon Coveney, made a commitment that by 1 July this year no homeless families would be left in hotels. More than 800 families are still in this situation with six weeks to go. Maybe when the Minister made this commitment he was hoping that by 1 July he would have moved on to better things and some other Minister would have to take the flak. This target will not be reached despite the Minister's most recent assurances. Even with the development of so-called hubs, and I believe there is a plan to establish up to ten of these in Dublin, they will certainly not be ready for use by July. These hubs are in themselves a form of temporary emergency accommodation. Admittedly they are better than hotels or bed and breakfasts, but moving families from one form of emergency accommodation to another, often miles away from the schools their children attend, is not a solution and Niamh Randall from Simon Communities stressed this point this morning on "Morning Ireland".

The other key question about the hubs is how long will families be there before they are properly housed. We now know the rapid build modular houses, proposed originally as temporary homes, are to become permanent homes. Will the hubs become a permanent feature of this Government's dysfunctional housing policy? Given the absence of public housing these families will only get housing in the private rental sector, but this morning the Simon Communities announced on the basis of a survey it did that nine out of ten rental properties are beyond the reach of those availing of housing assistance payment, HAP, and other rent supports. On the other side of this, increasing numbers of families are finding themselves homeless month by month. On top of this, a number of families are living in overcrowded accommodation elsewhere.

I know the Taoiseach will come back at me with a load of figures and projections for house building, but they are not real. Next to nothing is happening, which is why we now have the incredible plan from the Minister to gift to private developers 800 sites on 20,000 ha of land, owned by local authorities in the main, on which 50,000 housing units could be built. This has been described as the sale of the century. I would describe it as the sell-out of the century, on a par with the rip-off of our oil and gas resources, the bank bailout and the bonanza for vulture funds represented by NAMA. Is it not time to end this madness, stop, take stock and commit to a programme of public housing, starting with the construction of 50,000 units on these State lands?

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