Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

Here we go again. I had a young woman in my office this week. She was full of enthusiasm that there was a new movement on the ground. I actually held my head in exhaustion at the enthusiasm which is completely unaligned with what this Government and every other Government has done. I thank Sinn Féin again for bringing forward this motion. Obviously, the ban on evictions must be extended. If we were seriously interested in dealing with homelessness, then this would be the most basic step we would take. I have repeatedly pointed out that as I walk here to the Dáil from my hotel, I am passing people on the streets. Imagine I am becoming immune to this. Imagine I am walking past four or six people and the birds are playing around with the basic ingredients of life these people have. I am looking and wondering what has happened to me. What am I doing colluding with this? I try not to at every stage. I use every opportunity to speak to say there is something seriously wrong.

I have some of the figures here, and they are rising all the time, including 11,632 children. As the Sinn Féin motion goes on to say, this includes a figure of 3,442, but it does not include all the other homeless not recognised as such. I have been a Member of this House since 2016. Other than health and public transport, this is the topic on which I have spoken most. Foolishly, I then relaxed a little bit when a task force was set up for Galway in 2019. It was to set out to furnish an annual report. I foolishly thought it was going to look at the problem in Galway, which is as bad as if not worse than the problem in Dublin, but with little focus on it. Then here was this task force, with high-level people on it, and I thought it would be coming back with reports. Do the Deputies know what the Minister of State, Deputy O'Donnell, told me lately, and I complimented and congratulated him on his honesty? He said he had not received the report referred to in his reply and understood it was in preparation. This is the report for 2021 and 2022, from an emergency task force in Galway that was set up to look at the reasons for the situation there.

The minutes I have go back to May 2022. The last letter I have is very detailed, but it is not a report or an analysis.

Geraldine Tallon, the chairperson of the Galway social housing task force, said: "Notwithstanding the efforts made by both authorities despite the difficulties... it has to be recognised that the overall achievement falls far short of social housing need and of the annual average housing demand which you defined." She continues, but I have two minutes left so I cannot read out the rest of it, but it is all set out here that the local authorities are not achieving their targets despite their best efforts. What is the result of that? The Simon Community helpfully tells us every quarter and we are due another report in March. It looked at Galway told in 28 snapshots over three days. In the first snapshot it did not find a single property that was available under HAP, whether ordinary HAP rates or discretionary HAP rates. Galway city distinguished itself with two-bedroom houses for €3,000 a month. I saw an ad in the newspaper at the weekend for a tiny bit of land on the Claddagh, where I live. The auctioneer said it was wonderful. It was a tiny piece of land, smaller than where the clerks and reporters are sitting in front of me, for an astronomical price.

We are being fed the same thing we have been fed for the past ten or 15 years. What would I like? I certainly do not like standing up here and complaining. I do not like taking every God-given minute I can get to talk on this. There are so many other topics I would like to talk about. The Government is heading for continuous disaster when it keeps fiddling with the market and keeping prices artificially high through all the schemes it has brought in. Various Ministers bring up the help-to-buy scheme. It is a total disaster. All the evaluations have confirmed it is a total disaster. With regard to the mortgage-to-rent scheme, no analysis has been done and there is no business case. We have no idea what money has been paid to the voluntary bodies or the one private company that is there. We are told the Government is now going to get more private companies under expressions of interest. What is the solution? It is actually to act on the emergency and use public land for public housing. That is what we need. That is not what is happening in Galway. We are fiddling with different sites to have a mix. I am allergic to this language of "a mix". We have lots of land in the harbour area held for us in trust by a private company and it is negotiating with the Land Development Agency about mixes, which is keeping the prices of houses up.

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