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

This Bill should not be needed. I refuse to believe we cannot house those who are homeless and cannot deal with this housing crisis. It has been in the making for five or six years at its most extreme. I have concerns about the Bill, yet I can see it is not right for families to be separated. Local authorities sometimes take the view that the relevant section in the 1988 Act was for a cohort of people who had other complex needs but the basic point is that no child should be homeless. It is not acceptable for us to consider that any child should be homeless, and I do not want children to be labelled as homeless.

Some of what we have heard in the past week or two - the normalisation of homelessness, the comparisons to other countries, the attempts to minimise the extent of the crisis - is a backdrop to tonight's debate, unfortunately. The minute we accept family hubs as replacements for homes or accept child homelessness, we start dealing with the issue differently, and I have major concerns from that point of view. We have a Taoiseach who forcibly defended his comments that things are not that bad while more than 3,000 children will spend Christmas in emergency accommodation, and he has been supported by the chair of the national Housing Agency in some of his views. We are not dealing with reality here but with propaganda, and that propaganda is having a very detrimental impact on people who are suffering. Children are worrying about things that children should not have to worry about. Children's best interests surely are served by considering their constitutional rights in a very real way, by challenging the Constitution if it does not allow for the flexibility to use compulsory purchase orders, for example, or limit the extent of the rents that can be charged. I am not specifically talking about the Bill now but I saw the Minister on one of the "Prime Time" programmes in the past week listing all the things he was doing just to stand still or go backwards.

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