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

Honestly, for the Government to say council housing lists have reduced makes me want to scream. Does the Minister of State know the reason they have reduced in large part? It is because the Minister has refused to lift the income thresholds. Therefore, every week people are coming into my clinic who have been lopped off the list. They are still desperately in need of housing but because their income has crept up a few euro over the income threshold, which have not been raised for about a decade, they have been knocked off the list. The Government’s new plan to reduce the housing lists is to chop people off the housing lists, and for fewer people to be entitled to social housing even though there are no other options available to them, dragging a whole new cohort of people into the housing crisis. Similarly, the Minister of State mentioning of the HAP scheme makes me want to scream.

I spoke to an person in the HAP placefinder office in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown, which is supposed to find HAP tenancies, and she confirmed, not that I did not know this, that one-bedroom apartments in Sandyford are now going for €2,000 a month. The homeless HAP limit for one-bedroom accommodation is €975. People can forget that. Nobody is moving out of homeless accommodation because the money being provided by the State is not enough to bring a person even halfway towards meeting the level of rent required. Even if one managed to get a HAP tenancy, one could be homeless again in six months' time because there is nothing secure about them. Meanwhile in O'Devaney Gardens and sites all over the country, the Government is selling off public land that could be used for public housing to provide secure affordable housing. That is why we are in this mess.

A demonstration of housing protestors will take place on 5 December to coincide with the anniversary of the death of Jonathan Corrie. Those protestors have asked that there would be a debate on solutions to the housing crisis in here on the day of that rally, and I am glad that the Dáil Business Committee has agreed to that. I can tell the Minister of State they are protesting several years after the death of Jonathan Corrie because the Government has not provided any solutions other than ones that have made the situation worse.

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