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

The misery, suffering, hardship and cruelty that are being imposed on thousands of children, the 144,000 people on housing waiting lists and the 10,000 people who are homeless are simply intolerable and the position is getting worse and worse. The more we talk, the worse it gets. It is the bitter fruit of the disastrous decision the Minister's party took in 2011 - alongside the Labour Party it has to be said - to stop building council housing and to outsource it to the private sector. It is also a consequence of the failure for years to admit there was a crisis and the Minister's continuing failure to do what is necessary. I am sick of it.

Two weeks ago, I read an email from a woman with three children to the Minister. I will tell her story again, because there is a postscript to it now. She originally wrote to me that due to the housing assistance payment, HAP, rules, she was not able to rent a house in Enniskerry, as she could only get a payment of €1,500 for Wicklow. She told me that the following Friday, her family would move into a hotel in Bray, which would cost the public €4,390 a month. She asked if it would not be easier and cheaper to let her have the Dublin rate. She told me she would email Deputy Eoghan Murphy and her local Deputy, Deputy Simon Harris, as a matter of urgency. It had taken her three months to find a house in Enniskerry. She wrote there was nothing in north Wicklow for less than €2,000 and Dublin was even higher. She was angry, upset and scared. Her daughter was totally distraught as she had been all set to move into the new place.

This woman had found a place. An official named Mary, who works with the Minister, contacted the HAP office. Officials there said they were sorry but there was nothing they could do. In Enniskerry, about 200 m away from where that house is, one can get the Dublin limit. The Dún Laoghaire-Bray border cuts through that gap. In the case of houses that literally are a stone's throw from each other, an applicant can get €1,950 from HAP for one but only €1,440 for the other. The property costs €1,950, which is the Dublin limit. As a result, this woman is now in a hotel, costing us €4,300.

This woman wrote to me again to touch base. She wrote that the day had been tough. It had been the first day that she had really felt wobbly. She wrote she could feel the darkness coming. Her mental health is a huge issue and trying to keep everything together was starting to take its toll. She had made an appointment to see her GP the following day. At that point, it had only been five days since her family moved into the hotel. She wrote that she did not know what triggered it but that morning, she woke up and just knew that things had shifted. She wrote she was scared for herself and her children. Her eldest had a summer job and her middle child was in the room as she wrote, trying to block it all out. Her daughter had been at school but would finish the following day. She added a few things it is better not even to mention but they are not good things. She told me she was sorry to tell me about all of this and said she had been down the dark road of suicide before. She was scared that this would go on and on. She did not know how she or her children would cope. This is what is going on and I am just absolutely sick of it, as are the people who are suffering in this regard.

I have to hand some pictures of emergency accommodation in Stillorgan. One shows cockroaches crawling through the place. Another shows a dead rat. Another picture shows food that must be kept in plastic bags to prevent it from being affected by the rampant mould in the place. I also have correspondence from people who are in Dublin Region Homeless Executive, DRHE, accommodation in Clonskeagh with their children. The children do not have a proper place to play. Another resident - they are not blaming the resident but the children probably should not have been in the company of that resident - gave the children a BB gun. Young children were running around with a BB gun, which is a very dangerous weapon for a young child. There are complaints. I believe they have written to the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs, Deputy Zappone, about the way this was handled. The literature describing this emergency accommodation states children's safety will be the absolute priority and that there are protocols for dealing with all this kind of stuff. None of that has been followed. The residents are thinking of taking legal action over the State's negligence in ensuring the welfare of their children.

The stories multiply. I get calls every week from the hub in Dún Laoghaire about the difficulties people are facing in there. They are told to avail of the HAP. They are told there is a thing called a place finder service. This is an absolute joke. There is no place finder service because there are no places to find within the HAP limits. They do not exist. The people who work in the council know they do not exist and that is why they do not really provide a place finder service. The places are not there. If people are lucky enough to find a place, it is over the limit and then they cannot get the uplift to the place. Such people are stuck in the hub, the hotel or the emergency accommodation in these kinds of conditions with their mental health breaking down, terrified for the welfare of their children. It just goes on and on.

What really drives me around the twist is that side by side with such examples, in my area perfectly good apartments are sitting empty on Dún Laoghaire's main street. These are just the ones I know about. I have mentioned them three times in here. They are in the hands of Apollo Global Management, a vulture fund which bought them from the National Asset Management Agency, NAMA. It is sitting on eight or nine perfectly good properties that sit there empty; properties in which these families could be living.

I refer also to the Robin Hill apartments in Balally, where 25 apartments that were sold by NAMA are sitting there. NAMA refused to give them to Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council when it asked to buy them. They are still sitting there empty six or seven years later. Nothing has been done about it. Cerberus Capital Management, the vulture fund that owns them now, is watching the value of that property clock ever upwards. Cerberus will walk away without paying any tax because the then Minister for Finance, Deputy Noonan, introduced tax breaks to invite in these people to speculate on Irish property. They will pay nothing on the rental income on the ones they do rent and they will walk away without paying a cent in capital gains tax on the ones sitting there empty.

That is what is going on. The misery of these families and children is the flip side of the coin of the extortionate, greed-driven profiteering of vulture funds and landlords that the Minister's policies have facilitated and continue to facilitate. I ask him, where is the place finder service that will knock on the door of Apollo and demand that those apartments are made available to the people who are suffering in the hubs? Where is that place finder service?

If one goes down to the offices of Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council, one does not see a sign saying "Place finder service". I am sure it is the same everywhere else. There is no place where it is sitting there and one can go in. That is what there should be. There should be a big sign saying "Place finders: we are the people who help you find a place". They should be sitting there in the morning and people should be able to know that they will be there from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. People should know there are people working for the council whose job is solely to look for those places and who have the power to take them and give them to the people who are homeless. Anything less is just nonsense at this stage.

Then there is the fact that public land is being sat on. It is reported that 114,000 dwellings could be built on the lands that the local authorities and NAMA have. What is happening on these sites? For the most part, absolutely nothing. That does not even take in to account semi-State bodies like CIÉ, which sells sites to Mr. Johnny Ronan down on Spencer Dock

That is what they have done in London. The transport authority in London is using its property to provide affordable housing. What does CIÉ do? It is allowed by the Government to sell it to Johnny Ronan, who then goes into NAMA, buys his way out of NAMA eventually with the support of - guess who - the vulture funds, and is now back in business building properties on Spencer Dock that nobody will be able to afford. The value of the property is clocking ever upwards but the misery of the people living in homeless accommodation or waiting 15 or 20 years on housing lists goes on and on. When are we going to do something about this? It requires radical action. It requires doing things that so far the Government has refused to do, namely, get those properties. It must pass whatever emergency legislation is necessary to get those empty properties and commence immediately building public housing on the land we have. Otherwise, this human misery will just get worse and worse.

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