Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I must again express my fury that, given the shocking content of two reports published this week about the scandalous situation of children and families in homeless accommodation, the senior Minister is not here to respond to this debate. Perhaps it is just indicative of the fact that the situation has become completely indefensible. What the State is now guilty of is nothing short of criminal neglect and child abuse. There is no other way to describe it. When a report suggests that hundreds and hundreds of infants in emergency accommodation are unable to learn to crawl, chew or speak or to have anything like a normal developmental pathway, that is criminal abuse and child abuse. It is the Magdalen laundries of the 21st century waiting to happen. If it continues, we will be looking at redress schemes such as those we saw for the women and girls of the Magdalen laundries. It is utterly shameful.

The Government's attempt to address the homelessness and housing emergency, which its policies have largely created, is now beyond failure. According to the Respond report, only 8% of those entering emergency accommodation - 15% of whom are there for two years or more, 45% of whom are there more than a year, including, I repeat, in excess of 1,000 children - move on to secure social housing. The rest end up in insecure HAP tenancies and are liable to end up homeless again in the near future. The other big cohort end up having to go home into overcrowded conditions with their families or into other emergency accommodation, where the torture, hardship, neglect and abuse continue because of the failure of the Government to provide secure, affordable public housing on scale to address this housing crisis eight years after Fine Gael came to power.

It must be remembered many of these children are now facing into Christmas. The Irish National Teachers Organisation, INTO, and Focus Ireland have had to distribute a resource guide to teachers to deal with homeless children in school because of the stigma they face and the mental trauma they suffer by having to go into school every day in this situation of homelessness and where they cannot bring their friends home or have sleepovers. It is obscene but nothing seems to change. Nothing seems to move the Government.

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