Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

When the Minister, Deputy Noonan, walked in here this morning I asked him why he was here and not the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage, Deputy O'Brien. He said he had pulled the short straw, and indeed he has.

I have noticed that the Minister, unusually, has put in an amendment to our motion. We have been listening to Private Members’ motions for months now where there has been no opposition from the Government, it does not argue against us or vote against motions, it just ignores them and lets them run. This one however has been amended. I did a wordcount on it. We have 21 short paragraphs in our motion describing what Deputies Boyd Barrett and Murphy just outlined as to what we think should be a beginning of a solution to the housing crisis. The Minister responded with 50 long paragraphs. This place would drive you to drink to be honest because yesterday the same thing happened at the Committee on Environment and Climate Action. When I asked was there any intention on the part of the Government to go to COP27 and argue for more funding for people who are suffering from the extremes of climate change, a civil servant replied “blah blah blah” for almost 20 minutes. Can we get decent answers to reasonable questions?

This motion poses very reasonable questions and I want to pose a few more. One relates to Tathony House, which has been mentioned, in Kilmainham, Dublin 8. One of our members, a councillor, lives there and has been there for more than ten years. They have spent €120,000 on rent in that ten years. They are now being evicted by a landlord who happens to be, and I say this for a reason because I will follow on with another argument, one of our own, an Irishman called Ronan McDonnell who has made millions out of this block of flats. He is evicting 35 families. Those families are not just Irish. They come from all corners of the planet but they all work here and are rearing their children here. They are all very scared about what is going to happen to them. I wrote to Dublin City Council, DCC, immediately and said that this is in its area and we need housing, the people here are on the housing list, what is it going to do about it. Its answer is basically that there are no housing assistance payment, HAP, or homeless HAP tenancies in Tathony House, there is a very small number of acting housing applications on DCC’s list and it is not straight forward for DCC to intervene, that the tenants in situprotocol cannot be used unless there are HAP or RAS tenants there. Whatever we try to do here with these motions, there are always going to be obstacles. Protocols, rules and regulations are dragged up and brought before us either by local authorities or the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage. The truth of the matter is that it is a perfectly good site for DCC to buy regardless of who lives in it. We need more public properties into which to get people so that we can house them and give families security. Even if it was a question of buying it and fixing it up there would be permanent homes for people in the future so that they are not putting €120,000 down the toilet in rent over ten years to be told at the end of it that they are going to be evicted.

This is important in the context of the crisis of Ukraine and the numbers of refugees coming into this country. It is phenomenal but the numbers are nothing like those going into other countries. Ireland is in fact down the table on the number of refugees per 100,000 of population that we are taking in. The biggest number of refugees that move around the world when people are displaced go to some of the poorest countries and are allowed to stay there for years with very few supports. When people get frustrated, and I understand it, people are sick of listening to Ukraine refugees getting this, that and the other, and what are we going to do about Ukrainian refugees, I get that, but people have to be careful and remind ourselves that long before Russia ever entered Ukraine to embark on a war, long before there was any crisis in Ukraine, or a refugee crisis, we had a deep, extreme housing crisis here. It was put best to me by a young woman, who has been on the DCC housing list for 19 years, at a public meeting recently in Ballyfermot. Somebody got up and gave out about the Ukrainian refugees and she said “yes, I get it, we all think they are getting everything but I am 19 years on the housing list and that was long before there was ever any crisis in Ukraine”.

This housing crisis runs deep. It will be used to divide people and to put us against each other. When the question is asked about why we do not look after our own first, let us ask who are our own. The landlord of Tathony House is one of our own if that how you describe it. Many of the people who evade paying taxes in this country, many of the landlords who own and sit on empty properties for years and practically all of the politicians in this House, are our own.

I include in that all of the politicians on the opposite side of the House who, after decades of rule by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, have brought us into this housing crisis and kept us there.

It is important that the issues be dealt with and that the Minister stop playing games, turn up in the Chamber and defend himself. His amendment reminds me of Lady Macbeth, who could not protest enough when being accused of doing something of which she tried to say she was innocent. As Shakespeare wrote, "The lady doth protest too much, methinks". In this case, methinks the Minister doth protest too much because he is guilty of all of the problems that have been laid out this morning. The solutions have to be found urgently.

I want the Minister of State to address the question of how we will deal with local authorities that, even when it is necessary, refuse to buy properties from which tenants are being evicted. Can we deal with specific cases where occupancies do not necessarily tick all of the boxes of local authorities' protocols but do tick the box that is the need of ordinary people and families up and down the country? This would accrue to us more public housing, which would be in our housing stock on a permanent basis. In the case of St. Helen's Court, Tathony House or anywhere else, we need to instruct the local authorities to buy, buy and buy where they can, fix the housing up and make it habitable and permanent so that people can live in proper affordable public housing.

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