Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I will share time with Deputies Tóibín and Adams.

I warmly welcome the People Before Profit motion, which we are enthusiastically supporting.

I am running out of adjectives to describe the Minister's speeches to the House. I do not say that to be in any way personal. The gap between what the Minister is telling us week in and week out and the reality we are all experiencing in our constituencies is growing ever greater. Let us consider his record. Homelessness has increased consistently since he took office. Child homelessness has increased by a shocking 27% while pensioner homelessness has increased by a shocking 32%.

The Minister is wrong in his interpretation of the RTB figures. The board does not agree with him, based on its presentation to the Joint Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government yesterday. Throughout the State rents have increased by 7.1% in the past year. In Dublin, they have increased by 7.8% in the past year. The 4% cap that applies to Dublin, Galway, Cork, etc. is, therefore, not working. There is no evidence for the Minister to base his comments on quarterly interpretations. The rent cap applies for a year and those caps are being breached right across the country, either because the exemptions are too generous or because people are breaking the rules. The Minister is due to bring legislation before the House which we will support because it will give the RTB more powers of enforcement. However, the Minister would do himself and the rest of us a favour if he correctly interpreted his own agency's figures.

While we can dispute the figures, I accept there is an increase in housing supply, but it is not reducing cost. There is no evidence that prices for houses in high-demand areas are reducing. How many affordable homes has the Minister or his predecessor delivered through Government schemes in two years? The answer is "zero". I do not dispute that the supply of social housing is increasing, but the rate remains glacial. Funding is not sufficient, bureaucracy is still far too great and there is a chronic over-reliance on the private sector to the tune of 70% of social housing delivery over the course of the Government's plan - those are the Minister's figures, not mine. The Minister will be 12 months in office tomorrow and circumstances are much worse for thousands of families now.

I wish to focus on one of the important parts of the motion, which is vacant homes. It has slightly slipped off our radar in housing discussions, which is a mistake. The first line on the Rebuilding Ireland website refers to 183,000 vacant homes, according to the CSO. I accept the Minister is right; there are not 183,000 vacant homes. GeoDirectory has put the figure at 96,000 and the Minister has said it might be only 10% of the original figure, which would be 18,000. We do not know how many, but we know there are a lot.

How many homes has the Government brought back into use from that stock? Based on the reply to the most recent parliamentary question, we know through repair and leasing the number of tenancies created is nine. We know that from build and renew the total is approximately 70. Of the purchases from the Housing Agency, it is about 400. This means that less than 500 homes from the 18,000, 96,000 or 183,000 have been brought into play in the past two years. Those statistics speak volumes about the Government's failure.

The Minister is also disingenuous to suggest that we are wrong to criticise him for not publishing the strategy. His predecessor, the Tánaiste, Deputy Coveney, had it almost finished. It was on the Minister's desk. We all made submissions with constructive suggestions, but we have never seen it. I suspect we have never seen it because if the Minister published a strategy, we could then hold him to account for his failure to implement it.

We need to see clear targets for every local authority to bring vacant homes back into use, whatever the number. We need dedicated officers in every local authority. Some have them; some do not but they are required. We need a register of vacant properties held by local authorities so that people know the number of properties in their area and clear action plans with greater funding than has been provided to date. We also need a vacant-home tax for those, including banks, who have been wilfully and speculatively sitting on vacant properties and not to punish families in the fair deal scheme or stuck in probate.

I fully support the proposal to increase the Part V requirements. I fully support the critique and proposed changes to LIHAF. I warmly welcome the renewed call to amend the NAMA mandate. Without those changes, we will never achieve the level of affordability required. I support the motion and I urge the Minister to at least publish the strategy on vacant homes he claims to have so that we can start to see if it is delivering anything.

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