Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, Solidarity) | Oireachtas source

I find it very difficult to listen to the Government repeat its excuses about the very worst aspects of child homelessness.

3 o’clock

We hear them regularly at this stage. This is presented as a terrible natural disaster, which everyone is working very hard to try to sort it. That obscures the reality that this is an unnatural disaster, one that has been created by the Government's policies. We have children and families in homelessness, which will affect them for the rest of their lives, and we have the flipside of that coin, which is those who benefit from the Government's policies, namely, the one in three landlords on the Government benches and the developers. There are winners and losers from the Government's right-wing, neo-liberal approach to the housing crisis. The number of landlords receiving rent has almost trebled since 2009. Corporate landlords pay nothing in tax while the top 50 construction companies recorded sales of €8.4 billion last year, a 25% increase. They are the winners and the direct consequence of them winning and the policies designed to allow them to win is the horrendous crisis of child homelessness and homelessness in general.

How can Government members sleep at night? I think it is because they are utterly out of touch with the reality of ordinary people's lives and do not care. I thought it was revealed very callously and brutally by the answer given by the Tánaiste during Leaders' Questions when he described the rent increase for council tenants as modest. The Tánaiste thought that an increase of €13 per week for old age pensioners on low and fixed incomes is modest. He clearly thinks that an increase of €3 per week for everybody else is nothing. That is the cost of a latté for the Tánaiste but the reality is that for those families, that is the cost of school lunches for almost a week. The Government simply does not care and is completely out of touch.

I want to put a human face on this with a case with which my office has been dealing this week. It involves a young mother who was living with her family in completely overcrowded accommodation. She was sharing a room with her children and her younger 11-year-old brother was sharing a room with her parents. The situation became worse when she became homeless after family tensions meant she had to leave her family home. The costs of that crisis are immense and include mental health distress and familial breakdown. That left the mother and her children in a very precarious situation. They were not originally considered homeless by the council because they had lived in the family home. She then had to go to a homeless centre to be considered homeless meaning she had to stay away from her community indefinitely and her children's school indefinitely. That is the real cost of the Government's policies, for which it is responsible. It is also responsible for the winners and the profits they are making.

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