Tommy Broughan (Dublin Bay North, Independent) | Oireachtas source

However much we reject Boris Johnson's letter and his proposals, the Tánaiste has stated that it is a more serious effort to negotiate. Could we take it that, up to Hallowe'en, that this House will be kept informed at every turn in the negotiations?

I mainly want to ask the Tánaiste about his previous portfolio. As he is aware, yesterday, the Raise the Roof-Homes For All coalition stood outside Dáil Éireann. This time last year, the House passed a motion which called for affordable rents and security of tenure, ending eviction into homelessness, doubling national housing investment, the creation of a legal constitutional right to housing and the declaration of a housing emergency. Fine Gael was the only party to vote against the motion and to refuse to do anything about it in the past year.

While we have had an expansion of housing output at a snail’s pace, we still have homelessness and the deficit in housing supply is now embedded into our culture and society. As the Tánaiste is aware, for most of this year almost 10,000 people have, disgracefully, been homeless. Like many other Deputies, week in and week out I meet families in my constituency who are in great distress and who live in emergency accommodation, in overcrowded conditions in family homes, who sofa surf between the homes of relatives and friends and who even live in cars and vans. In my constituency, which is Dublin City Council's housing area B, more than 5,000 households are waiting to be rehoused, with nearly another 3,000 on transfer lists. In the Howth and Malahide areas of Fingal, there are another 2,000 in the same predicament. Yet, the monthly housing supply reports from the city and county councils provide just a trickle of accommodation for those families in desperate straits. The same is true of many other constituencies. The vast bulk of Dublin City Council's housing output, 70%, which is the same as last year, will be for housing assistance payment, HAP, tenancies. We know that very few people in HAP tenancies go on to social housing. The Tánaiste's colleague, the Minister for Housing, Planning and Local Government, Deputy Eoghan Murphy, told the Simon Community recently that his responsibility is to secure a budget that will see more homes being built and more housing output for the remainder of 2019 and into 2020. The Tánaiste has sated that Rebuilding Ireland needs an injection of adrenaline to get housing supply moving.

Like Deputy Boyd Barrett, I was not surprised either to learn from Killian Woods' article in The Sunday Business Post that two thirds of the fast-track housing approved by An Bord Pleanála has not been built. In my constituency, there is a major proposal to build 2,000 housing units but 1,200 of them are build-to-rent units and fewer than 200 will be social homes. My experience from watching the planning process and making submissions for almost 30 years is that developers' stories of planning delays are total fiction. Hundreds of planning permissions were granted in recent decades. Developers built 250,000 homes in just three years in the early 2000s. The planning process worked well enough; we did not need the changes. The Government must take action urgently, particularly on Tuesday next.

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