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

We are not suggesting for one minute that this piece of legislation is the solution to the housing crisis or homelessness. This Bill is simply a measure to ensure that people in the most desperate situations, who are victims of the failure of successive Governments and housing authorities, are not further persecuted and victimised beyond what they have had to endure so far from the lack of long-term solutions to the housing and homelessness crisis. It cannot be described as anything else. People are now putting sprinkler systems to sprinkle cold water on homeless people lying under doorways outside shops or businesses. As if it is not bad enough that their lives are in danger or that, when they ring an emergency number, they cannot get accommodation which they are not terrified to go into because of the drug use and alcohol problems in hostels and the fear that their clothes and goods will be stolen, meaning they are forced to sleep on the street, they then have to face the humiliation and indignity of a sprinkler system set up to sprinkle cold water on them while they are sleeping on the streets in winter. In other cases, spikes, bars and other barriers are put up to prevent them finding some sort of shelter from the cold and the elements.

I will not believe the credentials of the Minister, the Minister of State, Deputy English, or the Taoiseach until we get an apology for statements made in the past couple of weeks on this unprecedented homeless crisis. The Taoiseach should not tell us he has compassion or that the Opposition does not have a monopoly on compassion. He should apologise for suggesting the homelessness situation in this country is somehow normal by international standards. That minimises a shocking and unacceptable crisis. The Minister of State, Deputy English, suggested that those who continue to protest and shout out about the homelessness crisis are somehow damaging our international reputation. What a shocking attempt to turn the tables on those who are calling out the failure of the Government and the authorities to deal with this obscenity. Is the Minister going to demand an apology from Eileen Gleeson of the Dublin Region Homeless Executive, who made the extraordinary statement that people ended up homeless as a result of years of bad behaviour?

That is a shocking statement for anyone to make, or for Conor Skehan, head of the Housing Agency to talk about homelessness in this country being normal. If that is the attitude at the top, a situation which is already disastrous is destined to get worse. There should be apologies for this. The Government should pull back from this cynical and obviously orchestrated campaign, probably run by the strategic communications unit, to try to minimise the crisis. The Government needs to face up to it and do anything possible to stop the further persecution, suffering and hardship of people who are at the sharp end of this catastrophic failure by housing and governmental authorities. That is all this Bill does.

Beyond that, it allows for the right of advocacy groups, the homeless themselves and others to oppose planning permission for anti-homeless measures - the phrase itself is extraordinary. What will happen if we do not stop these anti-homeless measures is that we will get more deaths. If someone cannot sleep under a shelter that exists at the side of an office building or shopping centre, or under a bridge at a canal, where will he or she end up sleeping? Will this person magically get somewhere to stay? No, he or she will not. This person will end up sleeping in an even more dark, dingy, dangerous, unhealthy environment, down a back lane where we know that the likelihood of death is greatly increased, and deaths will increase significantly. That is what this specific measure proposes: it is to end the further persecution of the homeless.

Beyond that we are saying that the solution to this crisis is a massive increase in directly provided council housing on public land, rent controls that bring rent down to affordable levels, where rents are set at levels to prevent vulture funds or unscrupulous landlords from increasing rents to unaffordable levels, and stopping economic evictions by landlords or vulture funds.

I will conclude by answering why we keep going on about council housing. I have heard the Government's response, which accuses us of only wanting to talk about council housing but we are providing other types of social housing which is just as good. It is not just as good. There is a reason we are going on about council housing and its miserable levels of delivery. Can the Minister answer how many council houses were built in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown, which is one of the best performing areas for meeting the Government's targets? There were six. There are 6,000 people on the housing list and that will be 10,000 by the end of the year. Last year the council managed to build 54, so the figure is decreasing but they look better because we have approved housing bodies and more Part 5 schemes. That is not good enough and I will give a few examples why that is the case.

Nicola is 13 years on rent allowance and after all that time she is 98th on the list. She has four children, of 13 years, nine years, three years and one eight months. All four children are in one bedroom. The mother's bedroom is too small for even the travel cot that the eight month old is in. The three year old is also in a cot which is far too big for the room and the 13 and nine year olds are in bunks and have to get dressed in the one bathroom. They have no hope of getting housed. She does not want to get a HAP, which is social housing, because at least the landlord of this rotten, insufficient, over-crowded place happens to be a not-bad landlord who will not evict her. If she goes to a HAP house that could be slightly bigger, she could be evicted and homeless again within weeks because HAP is not like a council house. One can be evicted from it and people are regularly.

In the case of the Joyce family, there had been ten of them in a two bedroom house. Most of the members of that family have been in and out of homeless accommodation all their lives. Kayley, who is one of the children in the family, and is now a mother herself, decided that emergency accommodation would be better than living in those overcrowded conditions, with ten people over three generations in a chronically overcrowded house.

Sarah Jane has four children. Her sister, who also had four children, passed away and now she looks after eight children in a three bedroom house and no garden. She is in an approved housing body house. The problem in this case is that it is not possible to transfer from approved housing bodies to a council house because of overcrowding.

HAP is not like a council house. It does not give the sort of security, support and backup that a council house provides. That is why we keep going on about council houses, but the Government continues to resist building them or is doing so in miserable numbers even though, as highlighted last week, we have sufficient land to build 38,000 council houses, where last year the Government built 400. The targets are miserable compared to demand. That is the solution: the Government must start using public land and resources to build council houses so we adopt a serious long term solution to this crisis.

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