Ruth Coppinger (Dublin West, Solidarity) | Oireachtas source

One would not know from looking at this Chamber that there is a housing emergency. Our group demanded a discussion on this issue in the Dáil, but it is a pedestrian enough affair. As I look around there is no sign of any urgency on the government benches. We have been joined by only one other Member from the Government side. I have seen depressing times in here but this takes the biscuit.

The media would obviously prefer to focus on the Taoiseach jogging through the Phoenix Park, and his socks. That is absolutely of no consequence to the people who are affected by homelessness.

Rebuilding Ireland is working. That will be joyous news to the people on the housing lists. I am not aware of how many homeless people the Minister meets in his clinics every week. He is probably more likely to bump into developers and landlords in Fine Gael than people affected by homelessness. If he was, he would have intervened to stop homelessness happening with the kind of measures that even Threshold has called for this week, which have been voted down when introduced in Bills by the Opposition.

We have now reached intergenerational homelessness. I had a mother who was homeless in my office last week. She is in a B&B with two children, one with special needs and they are all in a room. Her daughter is also homeless with her child in another location. That is how bad the situation is.

The Minister indicated there had been a failure in reaching the target set by his predecessor to move families out of hotels and B&Bs. He is allocating €10 million to move 200 families from hotels to so-called hubs at a cost of €50,000 per family, which is a third of the construction cost of a house. The money would be better spent building social and affordable housing. Instead of hubs, why does the Minister not acquire vacant housing at a cost of €200,000 according to the previous census? It is never possible until it is possible, as we saw with the Tories in relation to Grenfell Tower. Suddenly, after massive pressure, they were able to find 68 luxury apartments. I expect the Minister could do the same if he really tried.

There has been talk of a vacant home tax and a doubling of the property tax. Investors who leave property lying idle for six months or more should have them CPO'd or requisitioned. Those are measures a left-wing Government would certainly take but it seems that the notion of building public housing on a major scale is ideologically unacceptable to a right-wing Government. Instead, we have priority given to incentives for private developers to provide trickle-down social or affordable housing.

The taxpayer has ponied up €200 million in the local infrastructure fund. How many affordable houses has it produced? Is there a maximum price a developer can charge for such houses if they have benefitted from the scheme, or does affordable mean different things in different places? An investigation showed no agreement was signed between the Government and developers before they availed of the scheme in terms of how much affordable housing would be provided. The Government continues to misidentify the planning process as the reason for a lack of homes.

An independent think-tank, TASC, has said it will take 40 years to house people on the Dublin City Council waiting list at the current rate of building. It seems that is the best capitalism can now offer people.

One of the key reasons for the positive response to Jeremy Corbyn's manifesto in Britain was the fact that he promised to build 500,000 council houses to deal with the housing emergency the Government’s like-minded neoliberal friends have created in Britain. If one adds in those who are facing what is academically called, severe housing unaffordability and insecurity, there are an extra 211,600 households, which is double the number on the waiting list. I assume they will have to wait 80 years to get a permanent home at the rate the Government is going.

The Government throws around figures for what it is spending. The important figure in the entire debate is that 652 new social units were provided last year either by local authorities or voluntary housing agencies. That is a total of 652 units in the throes of an emergency that has been raging for more than three years at its highest point. In spite of that, the Minister tells us Rebuilding Ireland is working. We were told 19,000 had their housing needs met because the Minister thinks somebody getting temporary private accommodation meets their housing needs. People who need housing, health care and SNAs are a burden to the Government. They really should not want what would have been considered acceptable 20 years ago.

There is no way out of the situation other than by funding local authorities to use public lands and preferably, directly building houses themselves, as that would ensure the work would be done more cheaply. They must build at least 100,000 public homes in the next five years and acquire at least 60,000 vacant units for public housing. The Government can finance that by raising taxation on big business and the wealthy but also by using three funds we have, namely, the Ireland Strategic Investment Fund, NAMA, and the fund the Government got from the windfall from the sale of shares in AIB, which it is using to pay down debt so as not to upset its EU friends but could be used to build housing with no charge.

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