Tommy Broughan (Dublin Bay North, Independent) | Oireachtas source

Last November, the Taoiseach came to Clongriffin in Dublin Bay North with the Minister, Deputy Eoghan Murphy, to lay the foundation stone for an 84 unit social housing development for the Iveagh Trust. Unfortunately these 84 welcome new homes we spoke of on that happy occasion will not be delivered until quarter 2 of 2019. Probably like the Taoiseach and many other Deputies, I meet dozens of citizens and families every weekend who are in great anxiety and distress over the Government's continuing failure to deliver social and affordable housing. I meet constituents who have spent 12, 14, 16 and even up to 20 years on housing and transfer lists and some of these are facing eviction from rental accommodation scheme, RAS, housing assistance payment, HAP, and rent supplement supported tenancies, sometimes on foot of a court order. Other desperate families are approaching two years or more in emergency homeless accommodation. It is also very depressing that homeless families with young children are still being allocated hotel-type accommodation, eight months after the Tánaiste promised me that that practice would cease. Recently, I came across two young people who were living in a car during the current dreadfully cold weather.

Dublin Bay North, as the Taoiseach may know, comprises the largest Dublin City Council housing area, area B, and the southern part of the Howth-Malahide housing area of Fingal county. The social housing statistics prepared by our city and county managers, Mr. Owen Keegan and Mr. Paul Reid, confirm the sense of hopelessness felt by my constituents in dire need of housing. On the last Dublin city waiting lists and allocations report, there were an astonishing 7,114 families and individuals on homeless, housing and transfer lists in area B out of 27,000 citywide. In the 2017 Housing Agency Rebuilding Ireland report, even before the numbers of households on the Howth-Malahide list are added to the city total, Dublin Bay North had the highest housing waiting list in Ireland, even bigger than the whole of Fingal and South Dublin. It is much more shocking that almost 700 of these individuals and families are homeless and nearly 900 have been waiting for more than ten years with a further almost 2,500 waiting more than five years. This is not just a problem for Dublin Bay North, as we have heard again today.

I do not doubt the sincerity of the Minister, Deputy Murphy, and national and local housing officials but the above data clearly show that Rebuilding Ireland is not working for our constituents. Over the past decade, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil have done everything possible to support a dysfunctional, rigged property market. At the same time, it was the Taoiseach's Government and Fianna Fáil which cut Dublin and local authorities' staff by 20% to 35% since 2008. Is it not time to abandon the ideological posturing and commit to a massive emergency programme of public, social and affordable housing as advocated by the Irish Congress of Trade Unions and its Charter for Housing Rights? Besides the declaration of a national housing and homelessness emergency, that charter demands a referendum to put the right to housing into the Constitution, robust legislation on tenants' rights, rents and standards of accommodation, a ban on evictions of citizens, families and children into homelessness and a land management policy based on the Kenny report and necessary compulsory purchase orders, CPOs. These demands are echoed by the Campaign for Public Housing which I also support. As part of this programme, will the Taoiseach now establish a national social and affordable housing development and construction company, even initially in the Dublin and other urban regions? I know the Taoiseach was discussing an amendment of the National Asset Management Agency legislation to permit NAMA to have this function. That seems impossible but we need a national effort because these figures are disgraceful.

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