Aodhán Ó Ríordáin (Dublin Bay North, Labour) | Oireachtas source

It would be remiss of me not to mention today that we laid to rest a former Minister for Education, Niamh Bhreathnach, who spent many years teaching children from the Oliver Bond flat complex in the north-west inner city. This inspired her to go into politics. She became Minister for Education and delivered radical reforms in that space and inspired people like me to turn to politics. Probably Deputy Nash and I were afforded the opportunity to go to third level because of her radical abolition of fees at that time.

I was inspired by what Niamh used to talk about in terms of her school life. It was similar to my own circumstances because, when it came to education, housing was everything. Niamh could only achieve so much with the children who she taught and I could only achieve so much with the children that I taught within the classroom because there was a reality outside of the school which was the homes in which these children lived. There is a middle-class middle-Ireland assumption of how every child lives and it does not equate to the most disadvantaged of communities. Even as the President brings forward this radical suggestion of the abolition of homework and others have talked about it, there is a middle-Ireland assumption of what homework is and how homework is done. I remember, in my school days and school teaching days, the reality of homework was that a child did not have the space in his or her home to do homework. They did not have a desk in their room. They had to do it lying on the floor. Often they had to do it on the stairs because of the overcrowded reality in which they were living. This was 20 years ago, around the time that Fianna Fáil had the brainwave to stop building social housing. Today when I go into classrooms and I talk to children about the nature of education and issues in society and they talk to me about homework, I talk about how sometimes it is difficult for children to do homework because of the homes in which they live. I always see a child whose head bows because he or she knows I am speaking to his or her reality. This is not only me talking about my experiences talking to children. This is me referencing cold, hard figures. The cold, hard figures from last December are that not only do we have 11,000 people in homelessness, but almost 3,500 of those are children.

The Minister of State, Deputy Noonan, can only imagine the life that one will lead if one starts off life in that insecurity of homelessness. We always talk about situations in our own constituency. Last Christmas, my colleague, Councillor Brian McDonagh, and I had to deal with a situation of a mother who was giving birth and had nowhere to go when she left the maternity hospital at Christmas time. In Ireland, one of the richest countries in the world, she had nowhere to go after she had this baby and we had to intervene. We did not do media on it, we did not send out press releases on it but the reality of my office in that week was trying to get somebody with a newborn baby somewhere to live in emergency accommodation for three months.

The Minister of State, Deputy Noonan, and the Government will celebrate the fact that it brought in an eviction ban. The Minister of State trumpeted it in his remarks. The Government resisted it for months. We had people in the Minister of State's position who told us that it was potentially unconstitutional and that the Government had to get the Attorney General's advice. We begged the Government for months and months to bring in the eviction ban and the Government stated it was potentially unconstitutional even though it had been done in 2015. I ask the Minister of State not come here and read out successes that the Department apparently has in terms of its housing response. We begged the Government to do it and we are begging the Minister of State today to do it because we cannot have that insecurity of children, 3,500 of whom are in homelessness, insecure accommodation or insecure rental situations whose mothers and fathers are telephoning us saying that they cannot live like this. The Minister of State will be aware that Barnardos says that 29% of parents are skipping meals to feed their children. Therefore, we have insecurity of food on top of insecurity of housing and the Minister of State is playing around with language about an eviction ban. Let us do now, today, what the Minister of State knows he will do anyway, that is, extend the eviction ban to the end of the year. I ask the Minister of State to realise the nature of the grinding punishment we are all meting out on children when they start their lives like this. It is just not fair.

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