Seán Crowe (Dublin South West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

There has been a lot of talk about this being personal. For me, the housing crisis is personal. I know people who are sleeping in cars, who are living in sheds. I have come across people I know who are sleeping in doorways. I know people who committed suicide when they lost their home. Three days ago, I received a letter from a woman who said she was going to commit suicide. The Minister received the same letter, as did the people in Pieta House. Therefore, for me, it is personal. It is personal, I do want solutions and we have put solutions forward. Only a fool would suggest that the Minister's measures are working. I can go through the statistics, and everyone has done that tonight. The figures are there. We have a broken system. We are not delivering for people. We are not delivering for those on housing lists or for those who are in rental accommodation who have their rents go up; it is not sustainable. People who would almost have been guaranteed to be able to afford a home, the likes of gardaí, nurses and teachers, cannot afford a home. Who are we building the homes for? Are they for landlords, for vulture funds? The system is not working, and that is what we are saying. There are solutions but the Minister is not delivering them.

Today, I received a letter from a councillor in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown, not my area. He said that the Minister is blaming the councils but he says that the Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown council put forward a proposal for 540 new social and affordable housing units on a site in Shanganagh Castle, the old prison site. It is eight months since that local authority applied to the Department for one stage of approval.

10 o’clock

Eight months on, that approval has not been granted even though it is the biggest council-led housing scheme in the State and is being backed by 40 councillors. There is a problem in this regard. The Minister is not delivering on this. He was talking about hubs. We have hubs in our area. The problem is that people are going into the hubs and hotels, but they are not moving out of them.

See this speech in context