Mick Barry (Cork North Central, Solidarity) | Oireachtas source

I will use my time to reply to some of the points that have been raised in the debate by those who voiced their opposition to the Bill. However, I will start by commenting on the information that has been provided to us and to the country today on the number of rough sleepers in this city. We are told there were 134 such rough sleepers six months ago and that on the night of the count in October, that figure had increased to 184. Moreover, if one includes the 50 people who stayed that night in Merchant's Quay, there were 234 people who could not be accommodated elsewhere. That is a shocking figure. It is not a small marginal increase. It is not an increase that has happened over a period of years. It is an increase of more than one third in the space of six months on the Minister's watch. It leaves a bitter taste in my mouth to listen to the Minister, Deputy Eoghan Murphy, come in here and state, it is "beginning to look like it [homelessness] is stabilising in Dublin" on the day that those figures are released. This is a shocking failure on the Minister of State, Deputy English's, part and on the part of the Government.

The Minister tried to recruit the Fr. Peter McVerry Trust as an ally in making the case against this Bill stating that the Fr. Peter McVerry Trust is for Housing First and is for providing homes instead of this approach. Fr. Peter McVerry supports this Bill. He participated in a press conference with us yesterday in support of this Bill. The other homeless charities also support this Bill. Let us have a little bit less of the political football from the Minister in that regard.

In arguing against the Bill in the media during the week, a Government source incredibly stated, "We do not want to enable people to stay on the street, we want to enable them to find a home." That is not an argument against this Bill. A homeless person who goes tonight to the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection office in Gandon House, across from Connolly Station, but who cannot sleep on a bench underneath a shelter because there are iron bars all along the line, will not get up and walk into a house because the Government has failed to provide housing or even a roof over that person's head. Instead, he or she will go somewhere else. If the person cannot get a place in such a building, he or she will go to a darker and quieter place, and the Minister of State knows where that leads to. There have been years of anti-homelessness laws in the United States and they show us where this leads to, if this policy continues. There were hearings recently in the State of Colorado about the anti-homelessness laws. They heard about the homeless man, who could not sleep outside a building, who went to sleep down a dark lane and was run over and killed by a car. They heard from five different women who had gone to sleep in dark quieter places and had been raped in those places. This is a criminal type of policy that the Minister of State, Deputy English, is defending with these anti-homeless devices.

Fianna Fáil, in the course of the debate, made points about rural crime. It is a complete red herring. The idea that people will put sprinkler systems up outside their homes to stop the homes from being robbed is nonsense, as is the idea that iron bars on benches outside of buildings will stop burglars. They would be stopped from what, from having a fag after the deed has been done? The point is Fianna Fáil knows that it is nonsense. I will not go into it in any great detail.

It is interesting that we did not see an appearance in this debate from the Independent Alliance. It is a busy day for them - the tickets to North Korea are officially being cancelled today. On the silence from the Independent Alliance, I would have liked to have seen the socialist Minister, Deputy Finian McGrath, or the socialist Minister, Deputy Halligan, come in here, look me in the eye and justify voting against a Bill that would ban sprinkler systems dousing homeless people with cold water on a cold November night.

I will save my final word for the Fine Gael Members of the House, many of whom say that they were inspired to come into politics by the ideas of the "Towards a Just Society" document that was produced in the 1960s. The Minister of State, Deputy English, cannot defend the idea of a just society and oppose a Bill that would make it easier to stop spikes, iron bars and sprinkler systems being used against those who the Government's policies have denied even having a roof over their heads.

See this speech in context