Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

Why is it that the Government feels it is necessary and possible to introduce emergency measures and emergency legislation to cut people's pay, to bail out banks or, as Deputy Murphy, said, to show its capacity in a good sense to take emergency measures in the face of a hurricane hitting this country? Governments can take emergency measures, marshal resources in an urgent way, which it would not do in ordinary times, and solve problems but when it comes to Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil and, indeed, the Labour Party when it was in government, the emergency measures are always about protecting banks and other financial institutions while refusing to acknowledge the emergency in housing and homelessness even when that causes untold human hardship.

My clinic is a tragic litany of cases of people in appalling situations. I had a case of young woman this week, which is heart breaking. She and her two children are in emergency accommodation. She has spent nine years on the housing list and she is close to a mental breakdown. With tears in her eyes, she said, "You know, I have been homeless all my life because before I went on the housing list and ended up in this situation with my two kids, my mother was on the housing list for the previous 15 years without ever getting a council house either and being pushed form Billy to Jack with me as a baby and then a child and now I am in the same situation". What an unbelievable failure of the main political parties in this country to do that to three generations of a family - her mother, herself and now her two young kids. Her case can be repeated again and again and still the Government will not call this an emergency and it refuses to take the emergency action it was so willing to take to ram through legislation to protect banks and financial institutions.

As I said in recent weeks, the situation is getting worse and now even all the hotels and hubs are full. There is nowhere for people to go. I could raise many issues but the budget reflected the Government's continued prioritisation of private for-profit interests. Most of the housing budget allocation goes to its friends, the private developers. A total of €750 million was allocated to the Home Building Finance Ireland, HBFI, agency initiative which will go to private developers with an additional €75 million allocated to the local infrastructure housing activation fund, LIHAF, on top of the €226 million originally allocated to it, an additional €31 million for long-term leasing and an additional €149 million for HAP. All this money goes to the private sector. What will the State get back from that? The Government has no answer to this. Almost none of the housing for which we will finance the private sector, to the tune of almost €1 billion, will be affordable. The LIHAF or HBFI funding is not tied to affordability or to a proportion of affordable housing that will be built. The Government will spend €1 billion on subsidising private developers to build housing at prices that are unaffordable and they will probably pay little tax either. The Government parties are still doing the things that led us into the mess we are in the first place and the consequences are such that third generations of families are left in diabolical, unacceptable and immoral housing situations.

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