Joan Collins (Dublin South Central, Independents 4 Change) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to speak on the affordable housing motion put forward by Deputy Cian O'Callaghan. It is an important issue to keep on raising. It is important to hold the Government and the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, to account for the crisis we are in now and have been facing for the past ten or 12 years. It has been clear for a long time that the housing crisis is out of the Government's control. Every report we get sees homelessness hit record after record. Rents and mortgages continue to skyrocket. Every day, people call my office looking for help because Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, the Labour Party and the Green Party spent decades selling off public housing stock without building any more.

This Government has pushed the cost of housing out of the reach of ordinary people because for decades, the parties in this Government and the Labour Party implemented neoliberal policies designed to allow big developers, banks and speculators to make billions in profits at the expense of people's ability to afford a home. Those policies have failed ordinary people. This Government created this housing crisis and all it has done is to allow the rich to make obscene profits from people's desperation.

We know the figures. Some 12,847 people, including 3,765 children, were homeless in July. That saw another record broken and what a terrible record to break. A number of Deputies have raised instances and individual cases and it is important to put forward the human cost and reality behind these numbers. I was contacted last week by a young girl who is homeless. She was offered lodgings in Gardiner Street. She has a one-and-half-year-old daughter and an eight-year-old daughter. There are no cooking facilities in her lodgings. She has been there since May. She is mainly feeding her children nuggets, goujons and that sort of thing. She tries to get up to her granny's every so often to get some nutritious food into her children. This is outrageous. She had an incident in the lodgings last week, which she reported to the management and the homeless section. She is on a waiting list for a homeless hub. Is that not horrendous? Not only do we have housing waiting lists, but we also have waiting lists for homeless hubs. It is scandalous.

I know of another young woman who is sleeping in a car. She works full time in Aer Lingus. She has homeless help but cannot afford to get anywhere.

Her son, who has special needs, moves from friend to friend because she tries to get some sort of security over his head. They were offered a place in a hotel but she was told she would have to find a childminder for her son, as he could not be left alone. In that case, that woman would not be able to afford childminders to come in and mind her son when she is working, so she would have to give up her job to mind her son in a hotel room. This is the reality for people. She is at the end of her tether. She was on the phone to me the other day, crying her eyes out, not knowing where to go or what to do and not seeing any hope at the end of the tunnel. That is the point. The Government's housing policy is not giving any hope to the thousands of people: on waiting lists; in homeless hubs; in homelessness; and sleeping in cars with their children. It is a scandal that this Government has stood over.

The ESRI released a report this week showing that new renters pay 15.2% more than existing renters. That is a clear sign that the Government has no control over the massively inflated rental market. The median income for first-time buyers of new homes is now more than €90,000, and more than €103,000 in Dublin, which is completely unaffordable for ordinary people. Meanwhile, the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage had a €1 billion underspend between 2020 and 2022 in its capital budget, and it missed its targets for delivering affordable purchase and cost rental homes by 7% in 2022. This is a disaster of the Government's making.

We have a situation in my constituency, in St. Michael's Estate, where a regeneration scheme was launched by the former Minister for Housing, Planning and Local Government, Eoghan Murphy, in 2019. The scheme involved the cost rental model and the building of public homes. We are still not even at spade stage. It will take another two years because they got rid of the previous company that was assisting in the development of the estate and they are going to contract out to a number of companies to proceed with the project. It has been four years and we will not see any turf being turned for another two or three years. That is another disaster of the Government's making. There are no supports to assist people in this. I will leave it at that because my time is up.

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