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

Is the Government not ashamed of itself? Some 10,200 people are in emergency accommodation, 3,784 of whom are children whose lives will be irredeemably scarred and marked by the experience of living in emergency accommodation for one or two years. For many of them, those years were preceded by the insecurity of facing eviction or unaffordable rents in private rented accommodation before they were evicted for sale or refurbishment. The Government has refused to take action in this regard and has voted against legislation that has sought to prevent those children from entering that shameful, unacceptable situation. Is the Government not ashamed? Does it not accept that its policies have failed?

Since Rebuilding Ireland was published, the number of adults in emergency accommodation has increased by 117%, the number of children in emergency accommodation has increased by 247%, while the number of children in emergency accommodation since Fine Gael entered Government in 2011 has increased by 470%. Is the Government not ashamed of that? Does it bother the Government that misery is being visited on those thousands of families, on top of the more than 100,000 families waiting a decade or more on social housing lists? Tens of thousands of working people - a whole generation - whose income is above the threshold to get them on a social housing list cannot afford the obscene prices and rents that are available in the private market. It is a whole generation locked out.

While that is happening, what is happening to the landlords to which the Government sold vast amounts of property through the National Asset Management Agency, NAMA? The situation has even been condemned by the United Nations, which agrees with what we are saying. A total of 93% of the property assets sold by NAMA have been sold to foreign investors that sit on land and speculate on it. Margaret Sweeney of Ires REIT has paid herself €680,000, while the profits of Cairn Homes, the largest owner of land in Dublin, increased by 267% last year. Is the Government not ashamed? Is it not true that the reason it is not delivering the social and affordable housing on the scale necessary to deal with the crisis and alleviate the suffering is that it is worried it will interfere with the profits of companies such as Cairn Homes, Hines and Ires REIT, which were invited into the country but do not even pay tax because of loopholes the Government has created regarding the massive profits the companies are accumulating? Is the Government not ashamed?

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