Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú) | Oireachtas source

I listened to the Taoiseach's speech and he excelled himself in his last week. Before he died the theoretical physicist, Stephen Hawking, wrote about the possibility of there being a parallel universe. The Taoiseach's speech represented a parallel universe to the experience of most people living in this country. It is clear that the measure of success or failure for a Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage is the provision of an adequate number of houses for their people. It is as simple as that. This must be done either through public provision or through a functioning market that can provide those houses. On that basis, the Government is failing severely. It is an incredible situation and it gives me no pleasure whatsoever to say that.

For this Government to have adequate housing, we need to build 50,000 homes every year for the next ten years and it is miles away from that. Even the target the Government set itself last year, of 28,000 homes, was missed. Therefore, this year the Government reduced the target by 5,000 homes. The most worrying and frightening aspect of this for most people is the current figures on commencement notices and the fact that they are significantly down and likely to remain significantly down for next year. There is a massive human and societal cost to what is happening. We have record homelessness, record local authority housing waiting lists, record rents and record house prices. How could we have confidence in a Government or Minister when that is the result of their work?

People are literally dying on the streets because of this in our towns and cities. Aontú has found out that more than 357 people have died on the streets of this capital alone in the last five years, an incredible figure and a national disaster, equivalent to a Boeing 747 crashing. That is just in this city; no other local authority in the State records the number of homeless people who die on the streets. I have asked for that to be done and it still has not been done, which is incredible.

We have young couples who are putting off having their children because they are living in a box room in their parents' homes. We have young parents who do not see their kids from one end of the week to the other because they are commuting three hours per day because they cannot afford a home close to where they live. We cannot get teachers, gardaí or nurses for our public services because they cannot afford accommodation on the wages they are on. Through all of this, we have a Minister who is not doing what is necessary.

We were the only State in Europe where housebuilding was closed for a full quarter during the Covid crisis. We are the only State that has not gotten to grips with the level of vacant homes in the country. It is incredible that the Minister for Finance, Deputy Donohoe, has resisted putting a tax on empty homes for as long as he possibly could. Now there is potentially a vacant homes tax in the offing that is nowhere near significant enough to change the behaviour of those people who are sitting on those homes and watching the prices of those homes increase. We have 160,000 vacant homes according to the statistics. We recently put in a parliamentary question and it showed that 392 homes have applied for the vacant property refurbishment grant. That is an incredible and staggering figure when it is compared with the number of vacant homes there are.

I refer to the direct provision of housing and the fact that 11 local authorities failed to build a single local authority home in the first six months of this year. Three Dublin councils failed to build a single home in the first six months of this year. A total of 647 homes were built in the first six months of this year. That is an incredible response to the enormity of a housing crisis that is bearing down so heavily on people's shoulders. On the reforms it has proceeded with, the Government has been dragged kicking and screaming into implementing them. Airbnbs have been taking homes out of the long-term letting market for so long and it is only now that we are getting to grips with that. We have rent controls, evictions bans and the reform of REITs and institutional investors. Again, these reforms are glacial when they are needed the most, which frustrates me. This Minister is in reverse, he is following the same pattern of the previous Ministers and I cannot support him.

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