Catherine Martin (Dublin Rathdown, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

Tá an Comhaontas Glas fíorshásta tacaíocht a thabhairt don rún seo. The Government lacks vision and strategic planning when it comes to the scale of the housing and homelessness crisis, which severely affects the most vulnerable in our society. I appreciate that the Minister, Deputy Eoghan Murphy, is relatively new to his brief. However, his party and the Government certainly are not. In the past four years we have had four Ministers with responsibility for housing. This is indicative of the Government's track record and shows the level of genuine intent, level of priority and respect for the role of this Ministry, which is at the centre of the biggest crisis of our time. It is an indicator of how this critical Ministry has been treated in recent times. It has become the revolving-door Ministry, with no continuity, no stability and no appropriate demonstration of the level of priority and real action the crisis clearly and urgently needs.

Government statistics for July show there were 1,429 families without homes. The figures have gone up by 25% in one year. The number of children without a home now stands at almost 3,000. That is 3,000 children without a place to call home. It is time for this Government to view housing as a human right and one which must be enshrined in the Constitution. Earlier this year, the Green Party introduced a Derelict and Vacant Sites Bill in the Seanad that would have addressed the specific problem of land hoarding in a number of ways, but remarkably in a time of an unprecedented crisis in homelessness, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael chose to vote against this Bill in the Seanad.

The State needs to create an affordable housing provision agency and implement a cost-rental model for affordable and social housing, which would be delivered by a newly-formed national housing trust linked to local authorities that would be outside the general government sector and provide a combination of affordable and social housing, either directly or through community land trusts or housing associations. The institution should ideally incorporate the capabilities developed in the Housing Agency and NAMA and could be an amalgam of the two. It would also incorporate existing expertise in the Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government, the local authorities and in the housing associations and co-operatives.

The housing issue is complex and there is a huge number of variables and perspectives which the Government needs to take into account to tackle it. It is absolutely unacceptable that the lack of real action we have seen from this Government continues. The Green Party will support this motion to show that the Dáil not only recognises the magnitude of the problem but the extremely urgent and present need to take immediate and effective action.

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