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

The Minister suggested that some of us are just playing politics with this issue and we do not really want to see the housing crisis improved because, somehow, there is some political benefit to us from its persistence. I do not know whether he is just saying that to play politics or if he actually believes it. I say to him that it is absolute nonsense.

I can tell him that I absolutely dread going into my clinic on a Monday and a Friday because of the misery I have to face when families and individuals come in, one after another, who find themselves in absolutely hopeless situations. I have lost count of how many of these situations I am dealing with, where over the next few weeks, a month, or couple of months, people are going to be made homeless because their landlords are selling up and there is nothing else for them. There are no council houses, no HAP properties available and now no emergency accommodation. There is not even emergency accommodation. As dreadful as that thought is, people are now scrambling for such emergency accommodation. It is utterly hopeless, and it gets worse.

There are so many different aspects to how much worse this situation has got. Rents have gone up by more than 100% in the last decade and average rents in Dublin are now more than €2,000 a month. In my area in the past six months, average monthly rents have been €2,600. That is completely unaffordable for the vast majority of people. In the same period that this has happened, the number of people eligible for social housing support has dropped because the Government refuses to raise the income thresholds for social housing eligibility and support.

There are so many different things I could have asked the Minister, but he has run off. I will ask him again tomorrow, for about the 50th time, when he is going to raise the social housing income thresholds. He promised me on at least three occasions in this House that we would be told the answer to this question before the summer recess. We are now going on recess, however, and there has been no answer to the question. The result is that again this week, just as there was last week, the week before that and the weeks before that, families who have been on the housing waiting list for up to ten to 12 years, and 15 years and 20 years in many cases, will be taken off that list. All those years waiting will count for nothing. Not only will those people now never get a council house, they will not even be entitled to the HAP. If people are not on the housing list, then they cannot get HAP. Therefore, if people get a pay increase or a promotion and their income goes just a few quid over that threshold, then they are goosed. They will have no chance of being able to afford something. These are people who are working but who will have no chance of being able to buy, no chance of being able to pay these rents and will not now even be entitled to social housing support.

We were told that a report has been sitting on the Minister’s desk since December 2021. Why has he not come into the House and told us what is in that review? Why? He promised us that he would do so. He has sat on that review since December and he has not brought that information into the House. Of course, however, we know the answer. This is a conscious strategy that has been pursued for five years to reduce the number of people eligible for social housing support. This is to reduce the numbers and to reduce the bill. This is what is going on.

Thankfully, the ESRI has quantified all this. In 2011, 47% of households were entitled to social housing support. This is now reduced to 33% as of 2019, and it is probably considerably lower now. The ESRI's figures only cover the period to 2019. Therefore, when rents are higher than ever before, when more and more people need help with the rent or social housing, fewer and fewer people are entitled to avail of those supports. It is a stealth cut of the nastiest kind and it is directly contributing to massive housing lists. This is why the Minister has run out. We do not get an answer to this question. I have asked the Taoiseach again where this report is. I know I am not going to get an answer from the Minister of State either.

If there is no other reason why I have no confidence in this Government, it is this: I was promised that we would have the review by now. I know what is going on. The Government wants to reduce eligibility for social housing. That is a fact. The Government wants to make everybody pray to the flipping market and to the same crowd who are building all these special housing developments, SHDs and build-to-rent apartments. Half of them, as we discovered from Killian Woods's report at the weekend, are in flipping tax havens, not paying tax and dodging tax and making a fortune out of the human misery in our rental crisis and the Government does not want to do anything about it.

I will conclude on this point. Apart from all the stuff in the context of this motion, which I obviously support, here is something simple that the Government could do now. Regarding all those SHDs, do not take 20%, take all of it. There is no justification for putting stuff on the market now at these kinds of rental prices. Take every bit of it. We will be paying for it anyway with HAP. If we got those properties into public hands ourselves, however, then we might actually make a dent in the homelessness crisis and in the housing emergency we are facing.

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