Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Last week in this Chamber the Government announced budget 2020 with the support of Fianna Fáil. At that time, I made the point that the housing crisis had become wrapped up in statistics rather than on the people behind those statistics. Late on Tuesday last, just before midnight a group of volunteers who offer food and clothing to Dublin homeless posted a photograph online. I am not sure if the Tánaiste has seen the photograph. It shows a five year old boy eating his dinner from a sheet on cardboard on the ground in this city. Sam is the boy in the photograph. He is five years old and, like any other child, he attends school, but Sam is homeless. Like thousands of other families in this State, Sam and his mum live in emergency accommodation. The Homeless Street Café, the volunteer group that met Sam on Tuesday night, made clear that his mother is trying her best to provide nutritious home-cooked meals for her children, but like so many parents of the homeless children of this State, they live in emergency accommodation that strictly forbids them cooking meals for their children.

This is Sam's life, without a home or the comfort and security that should be a right for every child in this State. This is the life of nearly 4,000 children who, like Sam, have been condemned to this type of nightmare. There is only one place our children should be on a Tuesday night, namely, safely tucked up in their beds in homes with their families. The moral stain of child homelessness in Ireland is creating a lost generation. Children are having their childhoods stolen from them right before our eyes. Homelessness is stunting their development, harming their education and exposing them to hardships that no child deserves and no society should accept.

Behind the statistics with which the Minister for Housing, Planning and Local Government, Deputy Eoghan Murphy, tries to bamboozle the public, there is a stark and dark reality of our housing crisis, a crisis manufactured by this Government and from which many are profiting from the suffering of others. At the end of August last, more than 10,000 people were recorded as homeless. August was the seventh month in a row in respect of which that number of people were recorded as homeless. There has been a 365% increase in homelessness during a five-year period of unending, uninterrupted economic growth. These figures do not provide the full picture. They do not include the women and children living in domestic violence shelters funded by Tusla, adults and children living in hostels that are not funded by Departments, and those still living in direct provision despite having secured their leave to remain.

This is the republic that the Tánaiste and the Government is building. The Government is failing parents and children like Sam. This is not a republic of opportunity that cherishes all of the children of the nation equally. It is a national shame. How can we, as a nation, accept this? How can the Government stand over it? What does the Tánaiste have to say to Sam and his parents and the many other children like Sam who find themselves in this situation?

See this speech in context