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

I move:

That Dáil Éireann:

notes that:

— the Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and Green Party Government has been in Office for two years;

— during this time rents have increased by 15 per cent, house prices by 22 per cent and homelessness by 19 per cent;

— in the last year alone child homelessness has increased by 41 per cent;

— there are 5,054 single people, 3,028 children and 1,366 families officially recognised as homeless;

— there are 3,278 adults and children with leave to remain trapped in Direct Provision;

— there are hundreds of adults and children in Tusla funded domestic violence refuges and homeless hostels not funded by the State;

— there is an unknown number of people sofa surfing or living in overcrowded and inadequate accommodation;

— travellers, people with disabilities, older people and migrants continue to live in unsuitable accommodation at the margins of our housing system;

— the latest Economic and Social Research Institute report on housing tenure and pension income adequacy indicates significant risk of increased pensioner poverty for those unable to buy their own home and dependent on private renting;

— Census 2022 identified 48,000 long-term vacant homes and 35,000 vacant rental homes;

— the targets set out in the Government's housing plan are not sufficient to meet the ever-growing housing need;

— the failure to deliver an adequate supply of public housing to meet social and affordable need is driving the housing crisis;

— the failure to provide an adequate supply of affordable student accommodation has led to an ever-deepening student accommodation crisis; and

— this ever-deepening housing disaster has led to the relaunch of the Raise the Roof Homes For All campaign led by the trade union movement, housing and homeless organisations, housing rights activists and political parties; and

agrees that Budget 2023 must deliver a radical shift in housing policy, as demanded by the Raise the Roof Homes For All campaign, including:

— a major focus on the delivery of large volumes of genuinely affordable homes for those locked out of the private rental and owner occupier markets;

— an increase in direct capital investment in public housing to deliver at least 20,000 social and affordable homes per year, including 4,000 affordable Cost Rental homes;

— a greater focus on bringing vacant homes back into use through the public housing programme and the introduction of a vacant property tax;

— an increase in the percentage of Part V units allocated for social and affordable housing;

— a ban on rent increases and measures to cut rents in the private rental sector;

— an emergency ban on evictions to halt the rise in homelessness and legislative change to restrict grounds for eviction;

— a new student accommodation strategy, in partnership with colleges and students' unions, delivering genuinely affordable accommodation for students on or near campus and greater protections for those students in digs-style accommodation;

— full implementation of the recommendations from the report of the Traveller Accommodation Expert Review Group;

— implementation of the Irish Refugee Council proposals for providing emergency accommodation to Ukrainian refugees fleeing the war;

— an end to all pro-developer subsidies including the Help to Buy scheme, the "First Home" Affordable Purchase Shared Equity Scheme and the Croí Cónaithe (Cities) Scheme;

— an introduction of measures to tackle the issues of speculative investment in land and land hoarding;

— an end to the outrageous tax reliefs on rent and capital gains for institutional cuckoo and vulture funds; and

— the holding of a referendum to enshrine the right to housing in the Constitution.

The Minister will remember that in 2016, 2017 and 2018, the current phase of the housing crisis started to escalate. In direct response, there were a growing number of protest movements, some of which were very localised and included local soup kitchens and homeless tables, and others of which were State-wide, such as the National Housing and Homeless Coalition. There were occupations of buildings here in Dublin and elsewhere as part of the Take Back the City movement. All of that culminated in a large trade union and civil society-led movement called Raise the Roof.

The Minister will also remember that in 2018, 10,000 to 15,000 people, led by the Irish Congress of Trade Unions and the entire trade union movement, many of the country's leading housing and homeless organisations, housing rights activists and political parties from the Opposition, gathered to call for the Dáil to support a motion setting out what was then the agreed position of Raise the Roof as to how best to tackle the housing crisis. That evening, the Minister and his party colleagues, who were in opposition but supporting the then Government through a confidence and supply arrangement, supported the Raise the Roof motion. That was the beginning of what many of us hoped was going to be a mass mobilisation of civil society and of people power to try to force a radical change in Government housing policy. Unfortunately, the pandemic and the public health restrictions, necessary as they were, intervened and the possibility of continuing large-scale popular mobilisation was put on hold.

Given the very serious deterioration in the housing and homelessness situation over the past 12 months, Raise the Roof relaunched its campaign earlier this year. The first phase was a series of public meetings around the country. Many of us have attended those meetings, spoke at them and participated in them. The meetings in Galway, Limerick, Maynooth, Dublin, Waterford and Navan have shown there is a public appetite to get involved again in the public campaign for a new direction in housing. Those meetings were also, in many cases, very disturbing because people were giving voice to their very real and acute level of housing need and housing stress, in part caused by Government policy failures. As part of the relaunch of the campaign, a range of Opposition parties have co-signed this Raise the Roof motion, which also carries the imprimaturof the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, the entire trade union movement, many of the homeless and housing NGOs, many housing rights activists, campaign groups and others. We are calling for something substantial in what we want the Government not to say but to do. I want to focus on the positives of this motion and contrast them with the gap between the rhetoric and reality of what this Government is doing.

At the centre of this motion is a demand for a refocusing of Government policy towards genuinely affordable homes, not measures that heap additional debt on working families to buy overpriced homes, not developer-led subsidies to lock in, if not push ever higher, the unaffordable cost of homes in our cities, and not tax reliefs for institutional investors who have a model for the development of residential stock that will be permanently unaffordable. This is about saying the State needs to increase direct capital investment dramatically in the delivery of large volumes of public homes on public land to meet social and affordable need.

On many occasions, the Minister has said, and I am sure he will say it today, that is what the Government is doing and that is in its plan. He will claim the Government is spending €4 billion this year to deliver the largest public housing building programme in the history of the State. First of all, the Government is not spending €4 billion on public housing this year. Anybody with eyes to read can look at the voted capital expenditure in the most recent budget. The Government is spending less than half of that. It is claiming that averaged expenditure, including approved housing body, AHB, borrowing and potential expenditure by the Land Development Agency, LDA, four, five or six years into the future, can be booked as €4 billion of expenditure this year but that is not what is happening.

Likewise, the Minister is telling us that the social housing programme this year will be the largest in the history of the State. That is not factually accurate on a per capitabasis or indeed on a real expenditure basis. Given that the Government has only actually delivered just over 600 social homes between the new-build programme and Part Vs in the first quarter of this year, which is not far off the delivery figures for last year, it is hard to see how that will develop.

Other colleagues will use their time to talk through the other elements of this motion but we are urging the Government to realise that unless it starts to deliver the 20,000 public homes a year it promised during the election campaign and quickly abandoned thereafter, this crisis is going to get worse. That is the key to tackling this crisis and it is the central element, though only one of many, in the motion before us today.

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