Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Business Committee for agreeing to my request to have a debate on this important report, Monitoring Adequate Housing in Ireland, by the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission and the Economic and Social Research Institute. I wanted this debate not only to discuss the contents of the report but also because what the report's authors and sponsors are trying to do is really important. I am somewhat surprised and a little disappointed that in the 15 minutes of his opening statement, the Minister of State spent three of them talking about the report and the remainder about all the good things the Government is promising to do. While the Government will, of course, use its time to promote the work it is doing, I would have thought that a little more considered commentary on the report itself, particularly some of the things the authors are urging all of us to do, would be valuable. I will outline what I mean by that presently.

What is really important about this report is that it is not just another description of the very difficult circumstances in which tens of thousands of people find themselves across the State. There have been many such reports produced by many good organisations. The IHREC has a very specific statutory function, which is not just to document cases of inequality but to assist the State in trying to understand fully the causes of that inequality and to monitor and measure it in order that, as the Government rolls out the measures the Minister of State outlined, we will have some evidence base to determine whether they make any difference. For instance, one of the issues the Government certainly needs to consider is whether it is going to embrace the kind of methodology that underlines the analysis in this report, which I will summarise shortly. More importantly, consideration must be given to a commitment to assessing the Government's actions and their outcomes over the weeks, months and years ahead against what is being proposed in this report.

What the IHREC is trying to do, in particular, is to say it is time we had a robust methodology for understanding and measuring housing adequacy. In fact, the methodology it sets out is quite innovative. It captures a broad range of circumstances, which gives us a much more profound insight into housing inadequacy and, in particular, how it affects specific groups of people. The Minister of State quickly ran through the six dimensions or criteria set out in the report but it is really important to understand them fully. Obviously, access to housing is key and that rests on supply, especially the supply of affordable purchase homes, social rental housing and affordable rental homes in the private rental sector. While the report acknowledges there has been some progress to date, it also mentions that this progress is from a very low base and, therefore, access is still a fundamental problem.

On affordability, the report outlines three indicators. This is interesting because "affordability" is one of the most used and most misunderstood words in the housing debate. The report outlines what is referred to as the 30:40 rule, which involves looking at households in the bottom four income deciles, which are spending more than 30% of their net income on mortgages or rents. It looks at the prevalence of what it calls post-housing poverty rates.

Paying very high housing costs makes people even more likely to be experiencing poverty in other aspects of their lives.

It also looks at prevalence of rent and mortgage arrears. The first of those is one the Economic and Social Research Institute, ESRI, and others have used before. Having that broader definition of affordability is crucial because it means when any of us are talking about increasing supply of private or public homes, we have to ensure that supply is done in a way that meets those kinds of indicators. It is a fundamental shift. It talks about security, both the length of tenure in accommodation and the security in that tenure. I will come back at the end to some of the Minister of State's comments on recent Cabinet decisions.

There is a cultural adequacy issue. This is not just about ensuring Travellers have access to culturally appropriate accommodation, where those families and individuals choose that, but whatever interim accommodation we provide for people seeking asylum in this country being culturally appropriate. I will respond to the Minister of State's comments on the Governments action on that to date.

Housing quality is very important. So much of our focus across the Chamber has been on increasing output that we have not paid enough attention to whether the quality of the accommodation already in our stock meets people's needs and how to ensure it is improved as new stock comes online. The Irish Government is still in breach of Article 16 of the European Convention on Human Rights, following the collective complaint taken by the residents of a large number of social housing projects throughout the State some years ago. While the Minister, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, has given us a detailed response to that, the most recent communication from the relevant committee in Strasbourg is the Government is still in breach of that article, notwithstanding the improvements it claims to have made. If we cannot even ensure the accommodation for existing social housing tenants is adequate, under international legal obligations, what hope do we have of improving accommodation into the future?

Location is also absolutely key. This is the sixth indicator in terms of proximity to services and access to other amenities. The Minister of State talked through some of the findings and I will not repeat those here, other than to say they confirm what many of us have known for a long time, that specific groups of people are structurally disadvantaged in our housing system and continue to be so, despite five years of Rebuilding Ireland and housing policies before that. Many of us will be keeping an open mind, but will be quite sceptical as to whether at the end of the current Government's housing plan, if we get to its end, those groups will be any less structurally disadvantaged. I hope they are, but the jury will be out on that for quite some time.

In addition to trying to provide a methodology, which the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission is urging all of us to embrace as a tool for independently assessing the progress of what the Government is doing, it also sets out a number of challenges. Some of those relate to Covid and the potential for homelessness to start rising again, which we have seen in the past four months of departmental reports, as we ease our way out of Covid and protections for renters have been lifted.

There is the continual rise in rents. We will have a more detailed debate about the Minister's latest attempt to clean up the mess of his last attempt to clean up the mess of his previous three or four attempts to clean up Eoghan Murphy's mess, when we debate the legislation in a couple of week's time.

Data is also absolutely crucial. The Minister is right that we will finally get a Traveller identifier in the housing needs assessment. It took the Department three years from when that recommendation was made by the expert group on Traveller accommodation to when it will happen. We will not get it until next year's housing needs assessment. We will not get the data until the following year, so it will be four years. It is taking us four years to make one, very important, but very small change in the overall quality of the data sets we have.

The Government needs to take the issue of how we best produce the data. This is no disrespect to any official in the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage, because they are busy doing other things, but I am not convinced they have the time or expertise to be primarily responsible for the collation and publication of data. That would be much better dealt with by the Central Statistics Office, CSO, and the Housing Agency on a whole range of fronts.

The Minister of State is codding himself if he thinks the list of actions he read out will tackle the fundamental structural problems underlying the kinds of housing disadvantage this report exposes. The policies he has outlined and the policy document on which it is based are broadly within the policy consensus that has dominated housing policy for successive Governments here since the 1990s. Those structural problems have been here through all of that.

The Minister of State, Deputy Noonan, is a decent man and genuinely cares about the structural inequalities we are discussing, notwithstanding the content of some of the speech he is, unfortunately, obliged to read out as a consequence of being a junior Minister of State. As future monitoring reports from organisations such as the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission are published, I ask him not to ignore or dismiss them and rely solely on the statistics and public lines provided to him by his policy advisers or civil servants. If they continue in the direction in which they have been going in recent years or deteriorate, I ask him to stop and absorb the information this independent body, established under statute by previous Governments, is providing to say things are not working and need to be done differently.

It is easy for the Government to dismiss the Opposition and accuse us of playing politics and not wanting to help. While I reject those claims when they are made, it is easy for the Government to do that. It is much more difficult for the Government to ignore the independent, rigorous and evidence-based research produced by organisations such as these. All I ask the Minister of State, despite the fact he has spent most of his time ignoring this report in his speech today, is not to ignore it when he goes back to the Custom House and embrace it and use it as a tool to improve housing policy into the future.

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