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

I thank the Minister for coming to the House to take this Topical Issue matter. I agreed to a substitute dealing with it in his place, but it is an added bonus that he is present.

We hear much about homelessness in Dublin. Obviously, as a consequence of its size and population, it has more homeless people than Galway. However, there is a crisis in housing in Galway. Very few social houses have been built there over the past seven or eight years, leaving a significant deficit. Many decent families cannot get permanent accommodation. In all my time in politics, I have never seen as dire a housing situation as that which currently prevails in Galway city.

Every Monday, I hold a clinic in the city which is attended by a large number of people. The extraordinary thing is that more than half of those who come to my clinic each week raise issues related to the housing crisis. In most cases, they are on the HAP scheme or renting and their landlord wants them to vacate. The first thing my staff and I do in such a situation is to ensure that the tenant has checked with a body such as Threshold to ensure the order to quit is valid. We then contact the city council.

These families have no particular issues other than the lack of a house. I have always accepted that many of the homeless people on the streets require significant social backup and may have challenges such as addiction problems. Those are not the people to whom I refer.

There are currently 53 families, or approximately 200 people, in emergency accommodation. We should consider the nature of emergency accommodation in Galway. In the summer time, there are no hotel or bed and breakfast spaces, so the council uses student accommodation that is vacant for the summer. When autumn comes, the student accommodation is required and families are put back into hotels and bed and breakfasts if and when they become available. Of course, in a growing city, that is becoming more problematic. One particular hotel closed and all of the families living there had to move out, some into bed and breakfasts. One of the parents asked me how she could feed her children with a proper healthy diet and not takeaways, given that she could not cook for herself or her family in the bed and breakfast. There is a crisis in Galway. People do not know where to go. In some cases, they move in with family members. However, if the family member is in local authority housing, the local authority has complete control and may decide that they are not permitted to share the accommodation because it would be overcrowded.

When will we ensure that everybody in this country has access to proper, permanent accommodation? We are ruining the lives of young people in particular, who are moving from school to school and place to place. Children are only young once. The dislocation they are experiencing may be causing a social problem the consequences of which we and their families will reap in the future.

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