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

This is not about the Minister or the Taoiseach. It is not personal. It is about the failure of the Government to break from a disastrously failing policy that is wreaking havoc on the lives of tens of thousands of our citizens. It is personal for those people. Our feelings and our political differences are irrelevant compared with the hardship and suffering those people are experiencing.

In the AV Room today two mothers burst into tears during the showing of a film they participated in about their experience, and the experience of their children, in emergency hotel and hub accommodation. Every Monday and Friday in my clinic and in many other clinics, mothers, children, fathers, families and individuals come streaming in, traumatised, suffering, afraid, anxious and fearful because they face eviction, because they have nowhere to live, because they have no prospect of getting a council house after waiting 15 or 20 years. The list of suffering, hardship and anxiety just goes on.

That is not an accident. It is the result of a policy the Minister has pursued. The policy has lead us to a situation where we now have 144,000 families on housing lists or transfer lists, when there were 96,000 on that list when Fianna Fáil was last in power - and that was bad - in 2011. The number of families in homeless accommodation has trebled in the seven years that Fine Gael has been in power. We have 70,000 people in serious mortgage arrears who face the prospect of their homes being repossessed. Students and young workers are paying extortionate rents to profiteering vulture funds and landlords. A whole generation of young people have no prospect of ever owing their own homes or even having secure or affordable roofs over their head. If a government cannot deliver the most elementary thing - a secure roof over the heads of its citizens - it does not deserve to be in office.

Do we have alternatives? We have repeated the alternatives ad nauseamfor the last seven years. Build council houses and affordable houses on public land. Stop evictions into homelessness. Use NAMA and its vast resources and land assets to provide public and affordable housing. Introduce rent control so that there can be no profiteering renting. Insert the right to housing into the Constitution as a basic human right. The Government has resisted those things because successive Ministers have pandered to the vulture funds and to the corporate landlords.

A headline from last weekend concerning one of the biggest residential developments planned in this State read: "U.S. investment firm poised to sell Cherrywood land". It goes on to say that US investment firm, Hines, which acquired a 412 acre site in Cherrywood in south Dublin four years ago for €240 million is preparing to sell off large residential plots from that portfolio capable of delivering 2,500 homes. It is flipping land, and it is making a fortune. The Government has let it happen. It put public money into providing the infrastructure. The company bought the land from NAMA for a song. It was invited in by Michael Noonan. The Government has allowed this to happen. The company is walking away with profits of hundreds of millions of euro, and not a sod has been turned, or a single house of any description delivered, never mind affordable or social housing. That is what is going on. A small number of people, facilitated by the Government, are profiting from the human misery being experienced by hundreds of thousands of our citizens. That is not acceptable. I appeal to the public to come out on the streets next Wednesday, outside the Dáil, when this issue will be raised again.

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