Mattie McGrath (Tipperary, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to speak on this motion. Given the seriousness of the issue it is absolutely vital that we support any effort, wherever it comes from, to throw an effective spotlight on this matter. This is such a crisis that the official record shows that 10,000 people are homeless, more than 3,000 of whom are children. I refer to the ongoing scandal of the national children's hospital. We do not care about children whether they are sick, healthy or homeless. I wonder where the Minister for Housing, Planning and Local Government, Deputy Eoghan Murphy, is this evening. This is a damning condemnation of the Government’s policy. It has failed. Fine Gael has been in power for eight years and it is getting worse.

I note that the motion recognises that in some European countries, such as Denmark and Sweden, housing co-operatives provide a much larger proportion of the housing stock, which is more affordable. Deputy McGuinness and I called for cross-party support when we introduced the National Housing Co-operative Bill 2017, which aimed to establish an off-balance sheet national housing co-operative. The sole intention of this co-operative would have been to keep families in mortgage distress in their homes. We did not get the necessary support. I welcome the Labour Party's motion this evening.

The time for piecemeal and clearly ineffective solutions to the mortgage and homelessness crisis is over. We need a radical approach that will generate significant and sustainable progress in the shortest possible time. The Bill we submitted sought to establish a new stand-alone entity, the national housing co-operative society, that would acquire all principal dwelling house, PDH, loans and all buy-to-let, BTL, residential loans in arrears for more than 360 days. We got great help with that and did great research. It is still my belief that this Bill would have greatly assisted us in reducing the levels of homelessness we are again discussing today. However, we did not get the support. We even had offers of help from American funds. However, the big banks called a halt.

Now we are talking about a boom, with construction cranes visible over the city. They are not building houses. Throughout the country no houses are being built. Something radical needs to be done. It would be better for the Minister of State to recognise this, because his Government will be facing the people very shortly and they will tell him the real situation.

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