Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

Today, the Children's Rights Alliance highlighted once again one of the most shameful aspects of the utterly disastrous housing crisis, namely the phenomena of child homelessness and the impact that has on children, on their mental health and on their well-being, and how, as they put it, it deprives and robs children of their precious childhood. The figures are stark. There are now 3,431 children in emergency accommodation. That can be multiplied that by several factors if the number of children who have been in and out of homelessness and emergency accommodation over the last number of years is taken into account. A total of 1,609 families who are homeless, with family homelessness up by 44% in one year and child homelessness up by 34%. They are shocking figures and it is a shocking failure by the State to look after our most vulnerable people.

As the Children's Rights Alliance highlights, a lot of this is down to the Government's failure to control rents and the yawning gap between rent supports in the form of housing assistance payment, HAP, and other payments that the Government is willing to give and the actual level of rents. The Government has done absolutely nothing to bridge that gap to give people some prospect of being able to find an affordable rental property when at the same time it has failed to deliver the public and affordable housing that could solve the crisis. The figures are stark. In my office today, we went on daft.ieand checked what rental properties were available in our area. There were 20 two-bedroom properties available. The average rent for those properties was €3,100 with the cheapest being €2,250. There were six three-bedroom properties. The average rent for those six was €4,000 per month, with the cheapest being €2,995. There was one one-bedroom property which, incredibly, is being rented at €3,445.

The HAP rates available to people are a fraction of those rents leaving no chance for people who are facing the prospect of being evicted through no fault of their own, or who are just looking for accommodation for themselves and their children of being able to afford those rental properties. My question is very simple. If the Taoiseach will not agree to the call we have made to address these matters over the past few weeks, will he now listen to the Children's Rights Alliance who said that he must retain the moratorium on no-fault evictions into homelessness and will he increase the rent supports available to people so that they have some prospect of affording these shocking rents if he is not willing to do what he should do, which is to introduce rent controls to make rents affordable for ordinary people?

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