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

I thank the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission for an excellent report. It puts flesh on the bones and summarises what a lot of Deputies face weekly in our clinics. A disproportionate number of those who come in to our clinics in serious trouble on housing are single mothers and people with disabilities whose needs are not being not met. We get some members of the new communities, often with bigger families, coming in whose needs are not being met. They are also disproportionately represented among the homeless.

We get people all the time citing the obvious fact that HAP payments are not sufficient to meet the levels of rent in our area. Average rents in our area are €2,200 per month. That means someone will need after tax income of €26,000 per year to pay for an average apartment. Most low-paid workers are single mothers, migrants who have recently moved to the country and people with disabilities. They do not have a take-home income anywhere near that. If that is the HAP limit and someone is below it, that person is homeless by definition. This report is giving us the hard facts on this. People come into us crying and desperate. They do not know what to do and they plead for help. The system is fundamentally failing them.

The Minister of State mentioned the place finder service. The people working in place finder are at a point where they need counselling, as are the people they are trying to help. They are looking in the same places as the people looking for HAP tenancies and cannot find places because they do not exist. We pushed and campaigned for a place finder system. We have put more resources into it but the places are not there.

If those among the one in 50 who manage to find a HAP place in our area that is within the rent limits, it is a regular phenomenon for their HAP tenancy to fold. According to the figures, they are socially housed but, in reality, they are not. The landlord pulls out of the arrangement and the tenant is back in homelessness. We have had families evicted from HAP tenancies three and four times when they were supposedly socially housed.

I will make some points on disability. According to the disability capacity review, we will have a shortfall of 3,900 residential places by 2032. The only policy in the strategy is decongregation but we do not have places and supports for people. We are 2,000 residential places short. I had somebody in to me this week who has resigned from the monitoring committee on the housing strategy for people with disability because he says the national housing strategy has no targets or numbers, just aspirations. At least the Government has targets in some other areas of housing, although we never meet them. There are not even targets in this area. People are asking for targets and numbers to deal with this problem.

Under the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, people with a disability have the right to choose who they live with and where they live. They are not given that right.

The policy at the moment is to wait until it reaches a crisis. It is a case of leave them at home with their parents and wait until the point at which it reaches a crisis, perhaps when they get too old or their parents get too old to look after them. That is the actual policy and that needs to be addressed.

I will say something about rents on the day that is in it. Rents are so far ahead of what the ordinary people earn. I am sorry – I say this to the Opposition as well – but a 2% cap on rent increases is no good because rents are way too high. I am also sorry to say to Sinn Féin that a refund of a month's rent will not cut it. I would not be against it if it came in, but it is not going to address the problem that rents are way too high. The vast majority of working people do not earn incomes sufficient to meet the rent levels in the epicentres of the crisis. Therefore, we need public, not-for-profit, subsidised, low-cost housing on a massive scale, much bigger than we are currently doing, but in addition we must have rent controls that set rents at another level. That is done in many countries and we have been arguing for this for years. Why do we not have a rent board that sets rents at affordable levels and resets them down to levels that are affordable for working people?

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