Jan O'Sullivan (Limerick City, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I would like to thank Deputy Broughan and his colleagues for tabling this motion. It gives us an opportunity to talk about homelessness again. We have not seen any of the real and substantial progress we need to address it from the Government. This morning the Minister said the social housing delivery figures for 2018 were good news and talked them up. The changes are minimal and are nowhere near the kind of numbers that the Government itself has accepted we need in order to address the housing crisis. There does not seem to be any significant change in policy. I refer to the decision to use available State land, most of which is owned by local authorities. Housing experts like Mr. Mel Reynolds have said there is enough local authority-owned land zoned for housing to build 30,000 units in the Dublin region and 50,000 in the State as a whole. The solution is to build social and affordable housing for the people who currently need it on land the State owns. However, that does not seem to be the solution the Government is pursuing. The main increase in the figures published today is once again in HAP, which was never meant to be a substitute for the construction of social housing. The number of payments has increased to 17,926 in 2018 while the build figure is below the target. It has increased from 2,297 in 2017 to 4,251 in 2018, but the target for 2018 was 4,409. It has not reached its target.

In the meantime, nearly 4,000 children are living in homeless accommodation. We must focus on those children. I know a family with two young children, both in primary school, that has been living in hotels for almost a year. There are many other families like that. As a result of the number of cases that have come to its attention, the office of the Ombudsman for Children is doing serious research on the effects on children of being in homelessness for a long time. There are serious and life-altering effects on young children. We just cannot leave them in that situation when we have solutions.

I agree with Deputy Curran on rapid-build housing. Rapid-build housing was supposed to deliver what it said on the tin, that is, rapid building, but it seems to have been abandoned. There is no evidence whatsoever that it is producing homes at an increased rate. That is one of the failures of Housing First. There are many others.

I agree with Deputy Ó Broin on Traveller accommodation. The outcome for last year means that less than half of the money allocated was spent. That is an indictment of policy implementation. The policy is there, but the implementation is not. That is about communication between the Department and the local authorities. They must ensure that if money cannot be spent in the way identified at the beginning of the year, it should be spent in other ways. We all know Travellers living in appalling conditions whose circumstances could be improved if that money was spent. The Minister said there are objections and various problems, but if the Government cannot spend money one way, it can spend it another. That money should be spent. Objections should not be taken as seriously as they apparently are. We need to get on with improving the lives of Traveller children.

In the time I have left, I will look at the data presented to us and in the Minister's statement this morning. He talked about improvements like the delivery of eight times more social housing units in 2018 than in 2015. He also talked about improvements on last year. The telling little piece of the statement was the exclusion of voids. As far as I know, this is the first time voids have been being excluded. Perhaps the Minister of State will correct me. In fact, the output of voids went down from 1,757 in 2017 to 560. That was the target.

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