Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I am sharing with Deputies Catherine Martin and Healy. First, I want to challenge some of the spin I am hearing around housing. With all the missed targets and with reports that delivered so much less than was promised, the approach should have been to say it as it is rather than to adopt a new line of spin. I heard the Taoiseach repeatedly say that 80 individuals and families will be housed by the State every day. I heard the Minister for Housing, Planning and Local Government repeating that. The Taoiseach said:

They are new tenancies. And on every working day this year, 80 individuals and families will be housed by the State. About 20,000 people will be housed by the State.

Most of those will be people who searched for housing themselves. They will have been put through the wringer in searching for housing, which often takes months with huge stress and they may at the end of it get a one-year tenancy. In 2016, 72% of all such tenancies were housing assistance payment, HAP, tenancies. They were not new houses entering the system. If that profile continues in 2017, of the 20,000 tenancies, 15,000 will be HAP tenancies. Of the 80 a day the Government talks about, if we use the same ratio, it will be just 22 delivered from voids, from housing associations, from local authority builds and from Part V provision. The lack of housing supply, whether it is local authority housing or housing that is affordable to rent or buy, affects us all. Apart from the human impact of homelessness or of living in overcrowded accommodation, which people are doing for years now, or adults with no prospect of living as adults should, independently of their parents, it also has an economic impact. It drives up costs and makes it difficult to employ people in some sectors such as nurses. In the context of Brexit, it limits our ability to absorb new industries. There is a real problem with spin. We are being told the numbers will be quadrupled over 2015. There were only 1,030 local authority builds in 2015. Let us cut out the spin and let us start calling it as it is. The response of Government is nothing short of pathetic in terms of the numbers and lack of ambition. Where there is not a silver bullet to resolve many of the problems straight away, the one thing we can be absolutely sure about is if we do not build, this problem will continue to get worse.

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