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

When the President referred to the poor law system that we thought we had left behind us as still being present, he was obviously referring to what is truly embarrassing, namely, the fact that there are 10,000 families, households, individuals and, worst of all, children in emergency accommodation. The situation has got worse and worse month after month under the auspices of this Government. There are 136,000 families on social housing waiting lists, some for a decade or two decades. There are an estimated 136,000 vacant properties, often being sat on by investors and speculators who this Government allowed to run riot and destroy the housing sector, while benefiting from the misery of tens of thousands of people who cannot afford the obscene rents or house prices and who were, in many cases, then driven into homelessness.

Was the President not right when he described this as a disaster? Are the people - the workers, students, pensioners and renters - who are going to come out on the streets this Saturday to protest and say they have had enough not right to be fed up and sick and tired of this Government's failure to do the most basic thing of putting an affordable roof over the heads of the people of this country?

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