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

I am delighted to have this brief opportunity to strongly support the initiative of Deputies Boyd Barrett, Gino Kenny and Bríd Smith in bringing this motion before the Dáil and in such a timely manner. A couple of weeks ago, I told the Tánaiste that according to the homelessness report of the Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government, almost 6,000 adults and 3,700 children are homeless and of these, more than 4,000 homeless adults and almost 3,000 homeless children were based in the four Dublin local authority areas. There are up to 40,000 households on the Dublin housing waiting list. The Dublin Bay North constituency is the worst affected in the country by homelessness and long housing lists.

People are pushed into homelessness by greedy landlords looking to cash in on the extortionate rents being charged in cities around the country, by greedy developers who are building homes to cater for landlords and by a small minority of flush professional first-time buyers, but most of all by the Government and its complete and utter inaction on this crisis or on putting the welfare of those 3,700 children ahead of the profit margins of landlords and developers. The Government's over-reliance on the private market and landlords is not working but the Taoiseach and the rest of the Minister of State's colleagues do not seem to care. They seem to think that this affects such a small number of people, relatively speaking, that they can waltz through the general election without worrying too much about this. It will, however, be a major stumbling block to the Minister of State's re-election and that of many of his colleagues.

I do not know how many more times colleagues on these benches will implore the Minister for Housing, Planning and Local Government to declare a housing emergency and use emergency powers to compulsorily purchase or lease vacant properties, to build on local authority, or where necessary, private, lands and to reduce rents to affordable levels by imposing serious rent controls linked to the consumer price index, CPI, not the pathetic controls introduced by the last Government and continued by the present Minister for Housing, Planning and Local Government. It is simple economics in that developers and landowners are withholding supply to push up prices, as they always have done. Due to the lack of affordable rental properties, many households are living in dangerous and overcrowded accommodation. The rental market has become so competitive that there is little hope for people on low incomes or in receipt of State housing supports to acquire such properties. We need a major change of policy in this regard. The motion before us sets out a well-thought out roadmap for how we could achieve a sustainable housing market. We discussed this a few minutes ago at the Committee on Budgetary Oversight. The delegation from the Economic and Social Research Institute, ESRI, which was before the committee said that there are exemplars in other European countries but they have different land use policies which we do not have and which we badly need.

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