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

We overwhelmingly agree that there needs to be radical new emergency actions to get vacant and derelict properties and vacant sites back into use to address the housing crisis.

The Government has singularly failed in its efforts to do that to date. Now, a crisis that has existed for nearly a decade, which we have not addressed, of housing and homelessness is being compounded by our need to show solidarity with people fleeing the bloody war in Ukraine, which we absolutely must do. Now has to be the moment to do things that are unprecedented. Those measures have to solve the accommodation crisis, both for those affected by the ongoing housing emergency and homelessness crisis and the people fleeing Ukraine. Unless we address the issue of vacant and derelict property in a seriously radical way, we are not going to be able to do that in the necessary timeframe.

It is important for us to remember the human side of this and why it is so urgent. This is an email I got in the last couple of days but I could read out dozens and dozens just from the last week or two. It states:

I am a public servant in the HSE. I ended up homeless, sleeping in my car. I got zero help from my county council. [I will not name the council or the employer so we do not identify the worker but it was a rural county council.] None. What happened to make me homeless was I had two deaths in my family. I left the family home and ended up paying all my wages for a while in a hotel and getting loans to stay in hotels. I ended up in severe money debt and had to sleep in my car. Not one ounce of help from the council. They knew I was sleeping in my car. I was going to work. I begged the council to help me. Nothing. I begged them to pay some for the hotel. I did not even get a reply to that. It is disgusting what is going on here. I am now living in a shed with no washing machine or cooker. It is damp, with rodents. I am public servant in the HSE so God help anybody who has no job.

This week, I am dealing with the case of another healthcare worker who works in a Dublin hospital. His wife cries to me on the phone as she sits in a park with her three kids while her husband is doing 12-hour shifts in a Dublin hospital, where he has worked throughout Covid. There is nothing for them. Their kids go to school in Shankill and Ballybrack and they were told to go to a place in Kilmainham, on the South Circular Road. That is all that was available to them. A council worker in my area is sleeping in his car. Another family are sleeping in a shed in a relative's back garden. I could go on.

Simultaneously, as I have been highlighting for the last four years, right across from my office there are 15 empty apartments in the hands of a vulture fund, which is trying to evict the five remaining tenants. They have been empty for two years. That is allowed to happen. I have told three or four Governments, at this stage, that we need to do something about this. The State should have the power to take those apartments and house the people who need them. A few years ago we highlighted a derelict site at the end of York Road, near Dún Laoghaire. It has been sitting there for years, derelict. Dozens of houses could be put on it. The owners now owe €140,000. That is only because we highlighted it and it was put on the vacant sites register. They owe €140,000, which they have not paid. The amount that has been paid for the 91,000 vacant sites all across the country is pitiful. We are not collecting this money. Recently, because we highlighted this, the owners of the site fixed the place up a bit and put in for planning permission. However, we discovered the company that owns it is registered in the Caribbean. They are only fixing it up and applying for planning permission in order to stave off action over its dereliction. This stuff is going on everywhere. Our main street in Dún Laoghaire is littered with empty buildings. Some are in private hands and some are in public hands. There is a place called Kelly's Hotel on George's Place in Dún Laoghaire which, just as it sounds like, used to be a hotel. It is owned by the council and has been sitting there for as long as I can remember - a decade, at least. We need a women's refuge. We need places for the homeless families in sheds and those being sent to the other side of the city and it is sitting there empty in public hands. I could go on.

This has to stop. This is the moment to take emergency measures, and that means short-circuiting property rights. Let us call a spade a spade. This cannot be allowed to stand. We do not even need a referendum to make this happen because the Constitution allows for the common good to override property rights and the common good is clearly served by ending the utter scandal of workers and families and kids in sheds, sleeping in cars, or being sent to emergency accommodation on the other side of the city where they could not possibly hope to get their kids to school in the morning. We passed a referendum on children's rights and we are doing this to kids. More than 2,000 kids are homeless, and the number is rising again. Their rights surely override the rights of speculators to sit on empty property, or vulture funds in the case of St. Helen's Court, or the rights of owners of derelict buildings. Dunnes Stores owns a site right in the middle of Dún Laoghaire that has been derelict for years. It is an absolute scandal. We need action. The State should be able to say to the owners of these sites that if they do not have a good excuse for something being derelict or vacant for more than six months, it will take it off them. It can then refurbish them and put people who need housing and have a right to it, whose rights are being abused and breached by not being provided with as basic a thing as a secure roof over their heads, into those properties. I do not know how any people can call themselves a government if they cannot do that for people when the physical properties and sites are there. We do not even count the derelict ones. In the census currently being conducted, and in the previous one, we did not even count the derelict sites. We need teams to be sent out from every local authority across the country to count these sites. We must insist they are brought back into use regardless of the impact on the property owners.

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