Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

In four weeks' time the emergency ban on evictions will end. From April, hundreds of people will face the prospect of losing their homes. Single people, couples, parents with children and pensioners will become homeless. In many local authorities emergency accommodation is already full to capacity. The system is at breaking point. In Dublin alone, 60 single people and 100 families from the county are in emergency accommodation in Meath and Kildare.

We are facing not only an increase in people in emergency accommodation from April but also a rise in rough sleeping and, under Tusla's rules, the prospect of families with children being referred to Garda stations for a safe place to sleep. Let that sink in for a moment. In a wealthy country with tens of thousands of vacant homes and hundreds of millions in unspent Government capital funding for housing, children will be forced to sleep in Garda stations.

Why is this happening? Who is responsible? The short answer is the Taoiseach. Last night he, the Tánaiste, Deputy Micheál Martin, and the Minister, Deputy Eamon Ryan, took a decision to allow homelessness to increase. They took a conscious decision that will force more single people, couples, parents with children and even pensioners into homelessness and, in some cases, into tents and Garda stations. Let us be clear that no other new or substantive decision was made last night. There were no additional measures to prevent people from becoming homeless in April. There were no emergency measures to increase the supply of much-needed social and affordable homes in the short term. There was just a cold, blunt decision to end the ban on evictions in four weeks' time. What a heartless, cruel and shameful decision.

When the emergency ban on evictions was introduced last October, we told the Government it was not enough. We urged the Government to use the breathing space the ban provided to take emergency action, namely, to expand the tenant in situscheme, to expand that scheme to affordable cost rental, to use emergency planning and procurement powers to target vacant and derelict properties, and to utilise new building technologies. This would all have been for the purposes of increasing and accelerating the delivery of social and affordable homes. However, the Taoiseach and his colleagues in government chose to ignore us. They have done nothing extra and now, because of their inaction and their decision last night, homelessness will increase.

Once again, Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil and the Green Party have abandoned renters. The Government parties are throwing them to the mercy of a totally dysfunctional market, a dysfunction created by 11 years of Fine Gael in government, propped up, of course, by Fianna Fáil for the past six years, and now joined by the Green Party, whose leader has been accused today by one of his own Dáil colleagues of abandoning his party's values and policies. Together, the parties in government have allowed rents to rise and keep rising. They have failed to deliver an appropriate volume of social or affordable homes to rent or buy. Year after year, they have missed their own social housing targets, targets that were not sufficient in the first place. As a result, people are in huge housing stress. A generation is locked out of homeownership, crippled by sky-high rents, trampled in cramped flat shares, stuck in the family's box bedroom, struggling through long, exhausting commutes and languishing on social housing waiting lists. Now we have the spectre of people being forced to emigrate because they cannot access an affordable home.

My question is simple. What is the Government going to do to prevent ever more people becoming homeless when it ends the eviction ban in April and what is it going to do to increase the supply of social and affordable housing to invert the ever-deepening housing emergency?

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