Mick Barry (Cork North Central, Solidarity) | Oireachtas source

I am sharing time with Deputies Paul Murphy and Boyd Barrett.

Almost 4,000 children are living in emergency accommodation. Where is the Minister? He should be here for this debate. Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil politicians and the capitalist market are responsible for blighting the lives of thousands of young children. That is no exaggeration. A Royal College of Physicians report indicates that a child in emergency accommodation is more likely to be bullied, less likely to see his or her friends, more likely to have asthma, an infectious disease, suffer poor nutrition or be obese and twice as likely to be hospitalised. It notes what it refers to as clinically significant levels of mental health and behavioural issues in 40% of the children surveyed. With 3,873 children in emergency accommodation, 40% of that number is more than 1,500.

It gets worse. This morning we read that 119 child-protection notices were made to Tusla by managers at emergency accommodation centres in the first eight months of this year, which is more than were made in the entire year from December 2017 to December 2018. Of these, 52 related to emotional abuse, 28 to neglect, 26 to physical abuse and 13 to sexual abuse. These figures under-represent the number of children at risk of harm in homeless services because they only represent the cases covered by mandatory reporting for the managers of the centres.

These horrors are directly related to the policies being pursued by the Minister of State, Deputy English, the Minister, Deputy Eoghan Murphy, and the rest of the Government. I could give many examples, but I will give one. Time and again the Minister of State has been offered the chance to support a policy of banning evictions into homelessness. He knows that the majority of these children were previously in private rental accommodation and that such a policy change would have spared them from the horrors of homelessness. However, the Government chose not to support such a policy. It chose to defend the property rights of the landlord class rather than support the rights of vulnerable children thereby supporting the greater good. How the hell do the Minister of State and the Minister sleep at night? I ask that in all sincerity.

I conclude by making two appeals. My first is to the voters of Cork North-Central, Wexford, Dublin Mid-West and Dublin Fingal. I appeal to them not to give their votes to the parties that have allowed nearly 4,000 children to be homeless. Those parties are Fine Gael, which leads the Government, and Fianna Fáil which props it up all along the line.

My second appeal is to the general public and working-class people in particular. I call on them to join the protest in Cork and Dublin on 5 December to protest against homelessness in the State. We need a total change in housing policy and to get that change we need to start with tens of thousands of angry people on the streets.

See this speech in context