Joan Collins (Dublin South Central, Independents 4 Change) | Oireachtas source

The housing situation is a crisis for everyone in the country. More and more people are feeling it. It is just getting worse. Doctors and nurses cannot find homes. Some 70% of young people are considering having to leave the country. High rents and mortgages are affecting families all over the country and we have over 11,500 people in emergency accommodation. That is the highest figure ever recorded. The number of people in emergency accommodation is an absolute scandal. How can the Government say that Housing for All is working when those figures have gone up, especially when we had an eviction ban in that time?

Lack of housing is first and foremost a class issue. It always affects the people in society with the least and who are the most vulnerable. Working class people and communities feel it first and feel it worst. This is while the Government gives away billions of euro in HAP payments to private landlords and sells our public land for a few meagre social housing units in return.

I listened to Deputy Bacik criticising €1 billion being used for HAP but I have to point out to the Labour Party that it was one of its own Ministers, Jan O’Sullivan, who introduced the HAP payment in the first place.

The only impediment to fixing this crisis is the lack of political will. The Government parties cling to their failed idea that the market will provide affordable housing and it refuses to stand up to elites who have made billions of euro from ordinary people struggling to keep a roof over their heads.

When this country was broke between the 1930s and the 1960s, we built thousands of houses. These houses were built by workers for workers. We had the political will then and we need that political will now. I do not believe that the Government will do it. It needs to allow the people to go to the polls and to vote for those who they think will do it.

There is an immediate need for a referendum to create a constitutional right to suitable and affordable homes for all according to their needs to ensure that we never get into this situation again. The State should immediately start building homes which should be a mixture of traditional social housing, public housing and affordable cost rental units and affordable housing. Public housing has been successful all over Europe for the last 100 years from following three things: quality; affordability; and fixity of tenure. We need that here.

The social housing threshold should be raised to €50,000 for a single person and at least €75,000 for a couple. It should cost no more than 15% of income. That would allow ordinary workers to access public housing. To facilitate the building of new public housing, the Land Development Agency, LDA, should be expanded and tasked with beginning the construction of public housing on all appropriate land owned by the State or semi-State bodies. It should be given increased powers to use compulsory purchase orders on derelict and vacant buildings. Approved housing bodies should be nationalised and incorporated into the LDA. Furthermore, we need to create a new national housing agency that is publicly funded to build on public land employing unionised workers and apprentices. People renting privately need to have their rights strengthened. We need better security of tenure. There should be new legislation to ensure that tenants are not affected by the sale of a property, such as with commercial properties.

The eviction ban needs to be extended to permanently ban economic evictions into homelessness. Over the last two or three weeks, we have seen a steady increase of people contacting the office with notices to quit. We have noticed in particular, that landlords are now using the Part 8 to the six-year time to tell people that they are letting them go and taking back the accommodation. One person told us they had been given a notice to quit under Part 8. The agency told them that it had another apartment available to them if they wished. This person's rent is €1,240 at the moment.

The apartment they are offering them would be €2,240. It is a convenient way to get people out of the low-rent aspect that they have. We know they cannot legally do that because a landlord or agency has to offer a person the same rent as the person who had left that premises.

We are also seeing an increase in men coming into the office. One guy came in on Friday in a terrible state. He had been couch surfing and had worked abroad over the years. He is a carpenter. He had a deposit for rent and has been on daft.iefor weeks trying to get rented accommodation. In the end, he used his deposit and down payment to buy a car to sleep in. That is the Ireland we are living in. That is a genuine case. That young man had been on the housing list, as he thought, for 25 years but we explained to him that would not be the case now. He was taken off the housing list in 2008. We are trying to get him back onto it again so he can get homeless HAP. If he gets it, what is it worth to him? He cannot get rented accommodation anywhere. People are trying to grasp some sort of hope they will get somewhere along the line and the Government is standing over it. It has been part of the process over the past 20 or 30 years.

Just before the eviction ban, everybody saw in their constituency offices an increase in young families, including people with children with autism, getting eviction notices. The eviction ban put that pending eviction off for about three or four months. They will all come back into an eviction situation if the Government does not extend the eviction ban. Imagine what it will be like then. Just before the eviction ban, we were told Dublin City Council and the homeless section had nowhere to put people. The only place they could go was overcrowded, if they had a family to go to, or the streets or a car. That is the reality in Ireland because of Government policies.

The only impediment to making these changes is the lack of political will. That will existed in the 1930s and the 1960s, when this country was broke. We are now one of the richest countries in the world yet supposedly cannot provide homes for people who need them. We can afford it. Build the houses.

I support the motion but have serious reservations about the Labour Party. It was in power between 2011 and 2016. The then Minister, Willie Penrose, announced the transformation of housing policy on 17 June 2011. That was some transformation of housing policy. The Labour Party had a Minister who brought in HAP and presided over a situation where practically no houses were being built at that time. That is why I have reservations but I will support the motion, particularly because the Government has tabled an amendment to it.

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