Barry Cowen (Offaly, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The housing crisis continues to get worse. When Deputy Coveney was Minister for Housing, Planning and Local Government in 2016, he said that it would get worse before it gets better and, unfortunately, he has proven to be correct. The number of homeless families has increased by 26% while the number of homeless children has increased by 30% in the last year alone. The bottom line is that there are far from enough social housing units being built, there are no affordable purchase or rental schemes and the barriers to construction have not been taken down. The media have been inundated with figures from the Government relating to the housing assistance payment, HAP and the rental accommodation scheme, RAS. These are nothing more than temporary stopgaps but they are now being trotted out as semi-permanent solutions. Rent costs are going into a different stratosphere, especially in Dublin. Young professionals and tradespeople are living at home with their parents, if there is room. HAP is masking the real picture. I know of one family in Galway who have been on the housing waiting list for nine years. They are 80th on that list but no social houses were built in 2016 or 2017 in Galway. That was at a time when the Government was telling us to keep the recovery going. Young working adults between 25 and 40 cannot afford to rent or save to buy a home. These people are in addition to the 91,000 people on waiting lists, as well as those who are on HAP and RAS. The latter schemes, as I have said, are temporary stopgaps but participants in those schemes are not on the housing waiting lists. They are on a transfer list that goes nowhere.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, on Monday the Minister for Housing, Planning and Local Government, Deputy Eoghan Murphy, claimed that the Government had exceeded its housing targets. That has to be one of the most cynical pronouncements in a while and there has been plenty of them. The Minister failed to explain that he moved the Government's targets and reduced them by 25%. He told the Dáil last October that the Government's target was to build 3,200 social homes in 2017. On Monday he claimed the Government had exceeded the target that was set at 2,400. The bottom line for Fine Gael in Government is that it is trying to blind people with announcements and pronouncements while not providing new homes. There are no homes being built in communities throughout the country where they are needed. That is the statistic that people can see for themselves.

When will the spinning cease? When will the Government start delivering affordable and social homes rather than relying on what are meant to be temporary stopgaps? When will it honour the commitments to provide significantly more social homes, to provide affordable rental and purchase schemes and to remove the barriers to private sector construction?

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