Cian O'Callaghan (Dublin Bay North, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State for her response. Based on what she said, there is a lack of a sense of urgency on this. There is a sense of complacency. I will talk about the housing aspect of this issue and how this is affecting the shortage and the crisis we have in teaching staff. It is not just affecting those in the education sector but key workers in healthcare and across our society.

I will say one thing about the Minister of State's comments with regard to housing. People, teachers and other key workers who need housing need somewhere affordable to live. They cannot live in Government housing targets or plans. They need affordable homes to live in. We keep hearing about the Government's plans to do this or that but what is needed are actual homes, that are affordable, for people move into and live in. It is almost three years now since the general election and since this Government came into office. The time for talking about things has passed. The Government saying it is going to do X, Y and Z in the future is not good enough. We need action on this now.

I am constantly talking to people who are affected by this crisis. The housing crisis is impacting on schools and education in three particular ways. It is a direct cause of this shortage in teachers and staff. It has impacted heavily in the classroom on children's development and education, especially children who have become homeless. When there is a child or several children in the classroom who are living in emergency accommodation, it is massively disruptive to their education. That obviously has an effect on the entire class and their well-being. I am constantly talking to parents who say the great work they have done, with the support of teachers, special needs assistants, SNAs, and school staff, to get their child through learning difficulties and challenges is ripped to shreds when they are evicted into emergency accommodation away from their local communities.

Another effect of this that we have not talked about yet is that teachers are ending up having to commute very long distances to get to work and to the classroom. They are arriving exhausted. They are not getting the same time with their families that they should be. Any teacher, especially people who have been teaching for the last ten or 15 years, will tell you about the transformation in the challenges they face as teachers over that time. They have to do a huge amount now. They have to meet challenges outside of the formal education part of their role. They support their students and give extra support to students dealing with a variety of challenges, including mental health challenges and all the other challenges young people are facing now. With all those extra challenges being put on teachers, along with the housing challenges and the fact they might be commuting longer and longer distances from other counties, they are arriving exhausted. For the welfare of our students and our children in schools, we need their teachers and staff to be able to give everything to their roles. By taking away from that and not managing things like the housing disaster, it is impacting on the welfare of our children in schools. That will have long-term effects on us as a country and as a society.

As I said, this is not just something that affects teachers. We are seeing these effects in healthcare and across the board. Let us look at the Government's delivery on housing and what has happened since this Government took office. Rents have reached record levels, house prices have reached record levels and the number of people living in homeless emergency accommodation has reached record levels under this Government. The number of young people in their 20s and 30s living in their childhood bedrooms has reached record levels. I have lost count of the number of teachers I have met in my constituency who feel they are doing everything right in terms of working hard in their jobs and yet they are in their late 20s or early 30s and they have had to return home to their childhood bedrooms. That is ripping up the social contract for those teachers who are putting everything into their work but want to be able to build an independent life for themselves. That is not too much for anyone to expect.

Incredibly, despite all of us knowing all these things, this Government is somehow leaving unspent hundreds of millions of euro that were allocated to be spent on housing this year, which would help to alleviate some of the pressures teachers, schools and principals are facing. The fiscal monitor published by the Government a few days ago shows that at the end of November, over €700 million that was meant to be spent by the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage so far this year had not been spent. This Government brought in Revised Estimates on housing this year. You would think, in this crisis, that such Estimates would involve hundreds of millions of euro of additional spending in housing to really get to grips with this disaster. Somehow, they did not involve additional spending but actually reallocated €337 million, which had been allocated to be spent on building much-needed new build local authority homes. That would take some of the pressure off the housing disaster we have, but instead that money was reallocated for other purposes and other headings, including €100 million to pay down local authority loans, instead of building those much-needed homes. Given the level of the disaster in housing and the impact it is having on our schools and on teachers, it is very hard to understand why this Government is not spending hundreds of millions of euro that it allocated to meet its targets in these areas. We have not had any satisfactory explanation from the Government as to why, in the middle of this disaster, that is what it is doing.

A number of things can be done immediately by the Government if it is serious about the housing disaster. Yesterday my colleague Deputy Shortall raised the tax on vacant homes with the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform, Deputy Michael McGrath. It has not been introduced yet, but it has been set at a miserly and ineffective 0.3%. The Government's projections in this regard show that the new tax will have a minimal impact on getting vacant homes back into use. According to the census figures, there are somewhere in the region of 160,000 vacant homes around the country, many of which could be brought back into use. If there was an effective tax put on them, tens of thousands of homes could be brought back into use and teachers and other workers would be able to avail of them. If the Government was serious about this crisis and disaster, it would do that, and do so immediately, rather than bringing in an ineffective measure it knows is designed to fail.

We keep on hearing from the Government and from different Ministers that the latest thing it will do to address this housing disaster will be to throw tax incentives at developers. Almost three years since the election, having failed to meet all its targets on housing in terms of affordable homes, cost rental homes and the delivery of social homes, it is now grasping at this and throwing even more incentives at developers. Instead of doing that, the Government should clearly be using the resources it has to ensure, through direct-building, that we get the affordable purchase, rental and social homes that are needed to take pressures off schools and teachers. Instead, the latest idea is to throw more incentives at developers and hope for the best, the latest attempt to resuscitate the build-to-rent sector and the investment funds, where that level of funding is now in difficulty, rather than looking at direct-build measures that would alleviate this crisis. I do not think the scale of this crisis and how it is affecting schools, children or teachers in schools, is understood by this Government. There are measures the Government could be taking right now to alleviate the housing disaster element of this and we just do not see it doing that. We do not see it taking this seriously and we do not see the kind of urgent action needed from the Government to ensure our children in our schools get the best possible education and the best possible support from their teaching staff.

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