Ruth Coppinger (Dublin West, Solidarity) | Oireachtas source

I want to begin by congratulating the Government for breaking a record - the highest number of rough sleepers since records began ten years ago, as my colleagues have said, with 184 in Dublin on one night plus 50 in the Merchants Quay café who were not able to get somewhere. They are not counted, by the way, in the Department's official homelessness report of October 2017, which counts only those availing of private supported or temporary emergency accommodation. Therefore, the homeless figures are obviously limited. In Dublin, there are 3,536 adults homeless and, nationally, it is 5,298, with 3,194 dependants, generally children. Obviously, we have the numbers on the housing list. As Peter McVerry, whom the Minister of State's colleague tried to use as a "partner", said, this does not include sofa surfing, people in massive overcrowding or those staying with family, given we have many parents with two children in rooms with their grandchildren or people in completely insecure and unaffordable accommodation.

The fact these anti-homeless voices are being led by State agencies is particularly shocking, and this includes Waterways Ireland which should be condemned for what it is doing. The Government should issue an instruction tomorrow that it desist from doing that. The Government has obviously stopped counting deaths but 345 people have died on the streets from 2005 to 2015, and the number of males in particular has sharply increased.

This is a serious problem of on-street homelessness but it is all interrelated. It is related to the people who are in emergency accommodation, to the people on the housing list and also to the people Fine Gael claims to represent, the people who are struggling to pay mortgages and rents. It is all interrelated. The Minister of State asked for a solution. It is not a mystery. We do not need to go searching for solutions and we do not need special committees. The solution is very simple. It is public lands and public homes. Yesterday it was revealed on RTÉ by a planner, Mel Reynolds, that local authorities have 12,000 hectares of land that could provide at least 38,000 homes. That is not to mention NAMA or other State agencies, just the councils themselves. The lands are already zoned and serviced, yet Dublin City Council last year built 56 public homes and my own council, Fingal County Council, built ten. Why, when the resources are sitting there, are they not being deployed?

This brings home the fact there is an ideological issue. It is not, as the Minister said, that the Government does not want mono-tenure estates. It is because there has been a change in policy in recent decades. In the 1970s, some 8,000 to 9,000 public homes were built by local authorities routinely but that is now gone. Neoliberalism has reigned for the past 20 to 25 years in particular. That particular Thatcherite philosophy says no society exists. It slashes public housing and demonises those in local authority and public housing. The unfortunate thing for ordinary people is that the private sector is on strike. Land is being hoarded, as we know, and there is no willingness on the part of private developers to build until prices rise even more.

Those prices are rising relentlessly. As my colleague showed at the start of the debate, this is working very well for a small number of people.

Before I continue, I will briefly give examples of what could be done to address opposition to the Bill. One of the reasons cited for opposing it is the possibility of unintended consequences, for example, squatter's rights, but someone needs to have stayed somewhere for 12 years to get those. The excuses have actually been funny, particularly Fianna Fáil's. We have heard everything from concern for Travellers to burglars. They must be the dumbest criminals if they cannot overcome a few spikes and a sprinkler system. We have heard it all. Clearly, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have decided that the business class that they ably represent at the best of times should not have to suffer the terrible difficulty of having to apply for planning permission for these devices.

Of course this Bill is not a solution to the housing crisis. If the Minister of State recalls, we tabled a Bill last January that could have banned most of the evictions that have since taken place on grounds of, for example, the sale of a property or its refurbishment. However, the Government turned its back on that. We have proposed other solutions. This Bill is designed to highlight the Government's attitude in particular to the homeless.

The Minister of State asked for solutions and said he never hears of any, but if all of the local authority land that I mentioned was used and planned out and the almost 200,000 vacant units-----

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