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

-----while people are suffering from homelessness and mocking people with Covid and making light of the work of our nurses. He is enjoying himself in South Africa while I have to deal with people like Brian who is 70 and is living in a shed. He should be cocooning but the only accommodation he is offered is a hostel in town, when he is living in Dún Laoghaire. There is Anthony, who is living in a tent in Stillorgan because he does not meet the criteria to get his own-door accommodation. I met another woman whose partner did get own-door accommodation in Temple Bar and is delighted with it, but she did not meet the criteria and is in shared accommodation in a hostel with four other people she does not know, which is contrary to the advice of the Chief Medical Officer. That is the contrast for me, a Cheann Comhairle, that is highlighted vividly in this crisis. There are people in South Africa who are making money from the housing crisis and mocking the pandemic, and then there are the people at the sharp end of all of this. I just want to know that the policies are now going to change, that this has changed the Minister's attitude towards housing provision. It should not be about people like these Celtic tiger developers and speculators. There should be permanent measures to eliminate the housing crisis and things like co-living.

Imagine if some of those co-living developments were in place now, built by some of those same Celtic tiger developers. Are they going to stop? Just stop building them because they are unsafe and only built for profit. Are we going to build housing for the people who really need it at affordable prices? That is what I want to know.

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