Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I join my colleagues in expressing sorrow, sympathy and support for families and friends of the two individuals who died in recent days. For those of us from the constituencies where the deaths happened, it brings the crisis home. I know very well the streets in Ranelagh where that poor man died. It is deeply shocking. There is a sense of loss and tragedy when that occurs. The crisis is right among us in all our communities and is real.

We need to work collaboratively to address this issue. A range of measures are needed. The need for a Housing First response is clear. Unfortunately there have always been cases of rough sleeping. There is now a clear connection between what is happening in our wider housing and homelessness crisis and this, the worst edge of it. We have to connect and tackle it in a co-ordinated way.

All the parties in this House need to identify how we can support the agencies looking to provide housing for people through social welfare and a range of different supported housing needs. People in that sector are increasingly running into difficulty in getting planning permission. We need certainty for those agencies. We need to assist those agencies in the provision of housing, by ensuring the planning process is not a restriction. We need to stand up to the concern that some neighbourhoods have over having a particular type of housing in their midst.

We need to support radical changes in provision. We need to cater for people who are homeless and also to cater for specific categories of people who are in need of supported accommodation. Our party will certainly help through our councillors at local level in identifying sites and ensuring planning permission is as smooth as possible. Local communities need to be brought in behind the sorts of solutions we need, avoiding unnecessary delay in the provision we need to make.

A point that has been repeated ad nauseambut bears repeating is that these terrible tragic incidents highlight that the Government, the Department and local authorities need to step up a gear and adopt a completely different attitude and approach. A person I met recently on the streets of Dublin cited the example that in Britain after the Second World War Chamberlain was instructed by Churchill in the then post-war government to build 3 million houses, and they were built within a certain number of years. That is the level of political commitment that we need.

The Minister of State has the support of all House to do this. His Department officials have to step up to that plate. The urgency and scale of the response required cannot be underestimated.

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