Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am sharing time with Deputy Joan Collins.

At the outset I declare my interest. My interest is in preventing housing being treated as a commodity to be traded on the market, in standing behind a policy and a government that treats housing as a basic human right, and that we build public housing of the highest standard. That is my declared interest before I use up my few minutes.

I thank Sinn Féin, although I do have some difficulties about some parts of the motion but I certainly fully endorse the ban on rent increases over three years and a temporary reintroduction of the ban on evictions, with which I have absolutely no problem. Time, unfortunately, will not allow me to go into my difficulties with the in situtenancy or with another aspect of the motion with regard to emergency planning. I tremble at the thought of giving more powers to the Government.

I thank Sinn Féin for bringing the motion and for putting the spotlight, once again, on the consequences of successive Government policy. This policy has led to a situation where houses are not affordable. All of the Government policies, including the housing assistance payment, HAP, and the tenantin situscheme, operate together to keep prices artificially high.

None of this should be happening. It is all a piecemeal without an overall picture - an overall picture for me being public housing where the prices of houses, including the price of my own house, must come down if we are serious about housing as a human right.

In Galway city, rents increased by 19.4% last year and the increase of 13.8% in the county was nearly as high. In the city, 263 are homeless. Earlier today I briefly referred to a homeless person in a wheelchair who arrived at my office yesterday with nowhere to go. As we know from the task force, which I will come back to, the homeless services are under extreme pressure and there is currently a waiting list for dealing with people in homelessness. When we ask how long that is, they tell us "How long is a piece of string?". I know the Minister of State will not give me that answer, but I brought this up with the Taoiseach earlier today and his answer was simply without any understanding - deliberately or not, I do not know - of what it is like to be homeless in a wheelchair and with nowhere to go. I am not given to using individual cases because we have enough information on a general level to tell us the policies of this Government and previous governments are absolutely disastrous.

Very helpfully, every three months the Simon Community issues a report entitled Locked Out of the Market. One is due; we are still waiting on it. The last four reports have consistently shown no properties available to rent through HAP or any category in Galway city or suburbs. That has been going on for years.

Parallel with that, we have major land in Galway, in the docks area, Ceannt Station, Sandy Road and elsewhere, with no master plan. I repeat for the record, there is no master plan. Ceannt Station is doing its own thing and the docks area is doing its own thing. I know from the task force that the harbour will produce a master plan sometime in the future and, as part of that, the public land owned by it will be used for affordable housing. It will not be public housing or social housing but affordable housing of a particular category to suit whatever plan it will produce, but no master plan.

A task force was set up in 2019, but we have no report from it although the Minister told me he has it and, in due course, it will be revealed to me. Like the Book of Revelations from the Bible, all will be revealed in due course. I certainly have a sense of outrage at a task force set up in 2019 and no report from it. I would have thought that, other than regular presentations, it would have come back with an analysis of what the problems are in Galway, what the constraints are, a focus on the absence of a master plan and so on. However, we have nothing. I do not want to be negative; I want public housing and public land. I want choices for people so they can afford to buy a house or rent a house for life, because security of tenure is vital.

The Government is pushing the tenant in situscheme. Obviously, as an emergency measure I will not object to it. However, in Galway where a house might be valued at €190,000 and the landlord wants something like €250,000 with €50,000 in the difference, the local authority understandably says it will not buy and yet we are pushing to buy it. All we are doing is keeping the prices of houses artificially high.

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