Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

The truly appalling rise in homelessness figures, especially child homelessness figures, should lead the members of this Government to hang their heads in shame at the hardship and suffering inflicted by the Government's failed policies on the 10,000 people now suffering homelessness, particularly for the children who suffer. The numbers of children in homelessness are increasing month on month. The disastrous figures published recently are the bitter fruits of six years of failed policies by Fine Gael and the Labour Party, and then by Fine Gael and the Independent Alliance. The figures are the direct consequence of the policies the Government has pursued and the inevitable consequence of the policies that have favoured the interests of private developers, private landlords, speculators and vulture funds over and above the needs of citizens for an affordable and secure roof over their heads. This is the simple fact of it. It is unbelievably surreal and insulting that the Minister's speech highlighted all the achievements, as he sees them, of the Government. One of the most incredible phrases in the Minister's speech is "all this hard work is paying dividends." It is Orwellian to say this in the week that record figures are announced for child and family homelessness. It is totally beyond belief. At what point will the Minister, Deputy Eoghan Murphy, recognise that the policies are failing disastrously? Their failure centres on the fact that the Minister is trying to get the private sector to do something it is completely incapable of doing. For six years we have called for an emergency programme of direct public, affordable housing provision on public land. We have also called for evictions to be frozen completely and for rent controls to be imposed that bring rents to affordable levels, not for rent certainty as some of the Opposition has called for: that is not enough. Rent certainty is no good when rents have reached unaffordable levels. What is the point in linking rents to the consumer price index when average rents in Dublin are €1,800? It is pointless. Rent has to be brought back to affordable levels. This would involve local authorities going in to rental accommodation and saying the landlord cannot charge more than a certain amount. The rents that landlords are allowed to charge must be based on what is affordable for real human beings on the incomes they have. Anything less than these measures and the problem is going to get worse and on the current trajectory it will get worse.

These figures do not surprise me, as appalling as they are.

I am not surprised but I am appalled by the proposals for affordable housing. When the Minister first announced the local infrastructure housing activation fund, LIHAF, funding, which was intended to deliver affordable housing, the promise was that every project where there was LIHAF funding would deliver 40% of that development at €300,000 or less. He immediately backtracked on that. Now we discover, for example, that of the 8,000 houses to be built at Cherrywood, which have been financed with €15 million of LIHAF funding, we will get 5%, not 40%. In the best case scenario there, a three-bedroom house will cost €357,000, and more likely significantly in excess of that. That is useless. What is the point in telling us that all these houses will be built if they are completely unaffordable for the majority of people, to rent or to purchase?

The time for talk is over, and the time to get on the streets is now. Government policy will be changed only when the people affected and angered by this crisis get out on the streets and that means joining the national demonstration called by the National Housing and Homelessness Coalition on 7 April at 2 p.m. at the Garden of Remembrance. If people are angry about this, they need to get out on the streets because the Government is not listening.

See this speech in context