Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, Solidarity) | Oireachtas source

The latest homeless figures are an unbelievable and shocking indictment of the Government's approach to housing and the homelessness crisis. The fact that it is accelerating at an increasing rate and that in the next month there will be over 10,000 people homeless in this State, with a massive increase in the number of homeless children, is shameful. I could not agree more with Deputy Boyd Barrett that nothing we say here is going to convince the Minister to change the ideology that lies behind his approach, and he will not do anything to resolve it. The crisis will get worse and worse. As people who are concerned by this, we need to get on the streets to build a movement as we did successfully on other issues and to force action. The next stage of that is the National Housing and Homeless Coalition protest on Saturday, 7 April at 2 p.m. in Parnell Square.

The Government has no strategy that can produce affordable housing on a meaningful scale. It adds more pro-landlord policies based on the same failed market-based ideology. They will not work and the Minister knows that but his ideology, combined with his party's close relationship with developers and landlords, means that he will continue to pour public money into private hands as opposed to using resources to build homes. The sheer scale and depth of the Government's failure was demonstrated earlier this month when the Simon Communities were locked out of the rental market report. That could not be more damning. There were just 532 properties available to rent nationwide over three days in mid-February 2018, fewer than half the number available when the surveys began in May 2015, and only 39 of those, 7%, were within housing assistance payment, HAP, or rent allowance limits. In Dublin, the story was even worse. There were only four properties available within HAP limits, three in Cork and none in Limerick. The Minister has created an out of control rental sector that is a nightmare of precarious living with unaffordable and poor quality housing for the 800,000 people living in rented accommodation.

The Government disgracefully seeks to distract from that failure, looking for scapegoats to engage in nasty, ugly, victim-blaming assisted by the likes of Conor Skehan. The Minister and the Taoiseach misused data on homelessness to claim falsely that it is low in Ireland compared with other countries, and tried very hard to normalise homelessness. Their failures and victim blaming were called out last week when a new report from FEANTSA, the leading representative body for European housing non-governmental organisations, NGOs, supported by the European Commission, included devastating criticism.

It stated "the last few months have seen vague, incompetent announcements from senior government officials, sometimes announcing figures far below the reality of homelessness, sometimes justifying – in bad faith – the mediocre results of state action by claiming that some people refuse to be housed, or that they even profit from the system by pretending to be homeless to get priority on ever-growing waiting lists for social housing". The Minister knows this was aimed at him, his Government and his victim-blaming accomplices. It is an indictment of his policies.

We know where the root of this is. Before the start of the neoliberal era, a brutal economic philosophy to which the Minister subscribes, one in five households lived in council-owned social housing. The building of social housing stopped, so that now only one in 13 households live in council-owned homes. The answer to the housing crisis is for the State to directly get involved in building social and affordable homes. This is not what the Government proposes to do. In South Dublin County Council, in the constituency of Dublin South-West, there is a plot of public land in Kilcarbery Grange in Clondalkin, where the council proposes to build 30% social housing and 70% for profit at market price housing that will be out of reach of the vast majority of ordinary people. The point is the land is available and we need to build public homes on public lands with a mix of social and affordable housing.

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