Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

There is not enough accommodation. We are not making this up. It would make one cry, listening to the people coming into one's office.

I do not want the Tánaiste to get the impression that a large number of the people coming to us looking for somewhere to live are rough sleepers. Rough sleepers are a small subset of people who need special attention, and I am very well aware of that. The majority of the people with whom I am dealing do not have social or addiction issues and are not rough sleepers. They have never slept rough but simply have nowhere to live because we are up to 3,000 units short of the demand in Galway.

There is no emergency accommodation because Galway is a big tourism town, as well as being a university town and a town with a large institute of technology, GMIT. There is no property available to rent. The HAP scheme is not the most lucrative market and there are other markets available to property owners. There are approximately 19 tourist accommodation providers in the city, for example, apart from Airbnb. There is obviously a strong market in the tourism sector.

We have been told that 1,100 social houses will be built by 2021. There is one simple step that could be taken tomorrow that will speed up that process. It is the same step that the Government took when it created Irish Water. It provided the money to the utility and allowed it to get on with the job. I cannot understand why local authorities are not being given money at the beginning of the year and being told to do the job. They should not have to keep going back to the Department for approval time and again, which means that it takes them an average of 59 weeks to get permission to build a house.

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