Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I guess the Minister could have a bog-standard speech stashed away in his filing cabinet or computer to pull out at least once per week as we deal with this housing catastrophe.

There will continue to be Bills, motions and proposals coming from the Opposition to the Government in Private Members' time to try to highlight and deal with an absolute catastrophe. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have for decades neglected the provision of public housing on public lands. They have left the provision of the country's housing needs in the hands of private developers, builders, landlords, financial interest groups, banks, estate agents, real estate agents, vulture funds and cuckoo funds. They have effectively gutted local authorities and have left social housing in the very limited situations available to people on incomes so low they could never afford to rent and particularly not the skyrocketing rents we see around our cities and towns now.

When we on this side of the House make concrete and rational proposals to try to deal with various aspects of the crisis that flow from these policies we are always told by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, by experts and possibly by legal advice - albeit we do not know where it comes from - that our suggestions would be unconstitutional as they would interfere with the rights of private property. This excuse was used for our proposal for effective rent controls, the compulsory purchasing of vacant and derelict sites and policies to stop land hoarding by developers.

The housing crisis has moved from being a crisis to being a disaster and now, I would argue, to being a catastrophe. Month after month we are told by the Government that it is delivering record levels of housing and social housing but it is a joke, except it is not a funny joke, that everything that gets blamed for the housing crisis, from the war to inflation, masks that it is not delivering affordable and social homes. Behind the rhetoric we see that the house building programme has not in any way been significantly wrapped up, not like it was in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s and even in the 1970s in this country. We are now one of the richest countries on the planet and we do not seem to be able to give people the basic provision that they need in the world, which is a nest where they have their young and rear them. Even the birds and the animals have a right to this and they get it but people do not, not in Ireland.

I want to take the Minister up on something that he said. He is gone now but the Minister of State has also said it. They said that the continuation of the eviction moratorium would make a difficult situation even worse. It has been repeated time and again by the Taoiseach, the Tánaiste, the Minister of State and the Minister who has just left that this would be the case but they have never proved it. They have never given us the reason for this and explained how it can be proved. They say it in the same way somebody says their prayers in the morning or says "Good day" to people they pass on the street. They just say it but they never actually prove the claim that the continuation of the moratorium on evictions would have made the crisis worse. Someday I hope they will at least try to give us the evidence for that statement.

I want to spend time speaking about Tathony House. It is in my constituency and some of my friends live there. Out of 34 tenancies that were in Tathony House 15 are left. Others have gone, some of them back to their countries of origin. A lot of them were migrant workers, including a hospital worker and her four-year-old daughter who are still there. A lung cancer patient who is receiving chemotherapy in St. James's Hospital nearby is still there. They have worked hard to put pressure on Dublin City Council to buy the complex. It is a small enough complex on Bow Lane in Kilmainham. It has 15 families still living in it. Dublin City Council has finally agreed to approach the landlord to look to purchase the building. It has been trying to do so for the past couple of weeks but guess what? The landlord is not responding. We do not know why but the landlord is not responding to calls, emails or letters. The 15 families who remain have decided that no matter what, they have no choice but to stay because they will not put themselves into homelessness. They want the landlord to realise that he must respond to the council.

Here is the big question for the Government. What are and what will be the consequences for landlords such as the landlord of Tathony House who refuse to engage when the Government has said it will try to purchase properties? In this case it is a multiple tenancy property. He refuses to engage and would rather make the tenants homeless. Is there no compulsion for landlords to engage with local authorities? It seems there is not. If not, should there not be a disincentive for landlords trying to sell a block of housing to an aparthotel, for example, and restrictions on planning for sites that are only free because dozens of people have been made homeless? There will be no-fault evictions of 15 families from Tathony House. The due eviction date is 2 June. The tenants have said they will not be leaving on that date.

This Saturday we will be joined by the controversial but very successful artist Spice Bag who did the very controversial painting of an illegal eviction recently. He will join us outside Tathony House as will musicians, local residents from Dublin 8, political parties and campaigning housing groups. We will all come together to show solidarity with those families and to demand that something is done to deal with this crisis. We cannot see those families being moved into a situation like another family I am dealing with, on which I will come back to the Minister of State afterwards. They have been in a hotel room for 15 months. There is a 19-year-old young woman, a 15-year-old autistic boy, a five-year-old autistic boy and two-year-old baby girl who doctors have said is underdeveloped. Why would she not be? She has nowhere to crawl, she has nowhere to go and she has nowhere to play. The father suffers from depression. He is suicidal because he blames himself that he cannot provide a nest for his children. Fifteen months later, they are still there. In any society this would be regarded as inhumane, unacceptable and disgraceful and that is exactly what it is.

This is a consequence of the housing policy of the Government. This is why the families in Tathony House refuse to go. They do not want to live like that. Can the Minister of State blame them? They cannot live like that even if they were fortunate enough to be able to get one room in a hotel, and a very low-class hotel I must add, for the multiple elements of the family, the mammy, the daddy, the baby, the young boy and the young girl or whatever. Something has to be done and something is not being done by the Government. It members have their heads in the sand and they are refusing to look to the one method of housing that did work and could work again in this country, whereby public housing is built on public land, not for profit, by public housing companies. The Government has stripped the local authorities of the ability to do this. It could have a local authority building company that works not for profit. There could be building on a scale that we had when this country was on its knees and had nothing. Now we have a surplus of €10 billion this year and a possible €18 billion next year. What the hell are we like? It is down to the Government to make the changes. What we can do is come back week after week and shout and roar and get down to the likes of Tathony House and show real solidarity and support for people who will resist evictions.

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