Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú) | Oireachtas source

The housing crisis affects everybody in society at some level. Some are suffering significantly but there are very few who are not affected by it throughout the State. First of all, the housing crisis is a life-and-death issue. It is leading to significant deaths. It is creating a situation in which people are being forced into emergency accommodation, with all of the negative aspects that entails. For a youngster growing up in emergency accommodation, their whole ability to socialise and study, for good nutrition and all those elements of their life are radically restricted by the housing crisis. It is leading to hundreds of thousands of people being in housing distress, either having difficulty paying mortgages or rent or living in the spare rooms of their parents, not able to get accommodation for themselves. It also significantly affects public services. Doctors, nurses and teachers are not able to live in particular regions because prices are far too high. Indeed, the whole system of spatial development in this country means that if you are a youngster and have a college degree, you pretty much have to move to Dublin to get a college-type job but you cannot live in Dublin because of the prices of houses; you have to live 30, 40 or 50 miles away. That means you are part of the commuter hell experience people are forced to live in throughout the State. Even levels of private and foreign direct investment are now reducing due to the fact that we have such a crisis in housing.

As I said, it is first of all a life-and-death issue. We in Aontú have been raising this consistently over the last number of years. The figures are shocking. In the whole country, only Dublin records the number of people who die in homelessness. No other local authority records people who lose their lives in homelessness. In 2018, we found out that 47 homeless people died in Dublin. In 2019, 49 homeless people died in Dublin. It became obvious to me in summer 2020 that something drastic was happening.

We learned that homeless people were being denied services and help in Dublin and told to go home to their counties of origin, even though, because of Covid, a person could be arrested for crossing county boundaries at that time. The Government promised an investigation. Tragically, that investigation has dragged on for years. In 2020, 76 people died in homelessness in Dublin, an incredible figure. It represents a 60% increase on the death rate in the previous year. The following year, 115 people died in homelessness in Dublin, and last year it was 95 people. It is incredible that so many people are dying in Dublin, in large part because of homelessness.

Behind each of these statistics there is, or was, a living human being - a person who had family and friends. The age cohort of these deaths is also very concerning. Of the 20 people who died in homelessness in Dublin so far this year, ten were between the ages of 30 and 49. Two thirds of the people who died in homelessness this year were younger than me. This is an horrendous stain on the record of this society of protecting the people who are most in need. Deputies have no choice but to support the motion. In this type of humanitarian disaster, there is a need to pull out all the stops to protect those who are most vulnerable. Aontú supports a ban on no-fault eviction in a housing crisis.

The way the Government is seeking to delay the Bill is extremely undemocratic. The idea that a Bill has the democratic mandate of the House but the Government is seeking to delay its passage through the Dáil is political chicanery. It is two fingers to the democratic will of the Dáil. Even the tool of delaying Bills shows the lack of cohesion that exists between Government parties. The Government cannot come to a decision on a political way forward, so it literally kicks the can down the road in terms of making a decision on it. That is the situation we have in respect of the Government.

I refer to the number of local authority houses that are empty. My office put in a freedom of information request to every local authority during the summer and we found out there are 3,500 local authority homes in the State currently vacant. There are 12,800 people in homeless or emergency accommodation, of whom 4,000 are children, yet the State is sitting on 3,500 empty homes. Putting people into emergency accommodation is a humanitarian disaster. There is a cost in human terms but there is also a financial cost. It cost hundreds of millions of euro to pay for emergency accommodation for people. The Government is doing that while it is sitting on 3,500 empty homes. In responding to the information we published approximately a fortnight ago, the Taoiseach stated there was good reason these homes were empty. It has taken, on average, eight months to turn around a local authority home. In some cases it has taken two years for a local authority to turn around a home and re-let it. It takes, on average, three weeks to turn around a private rental home. How can the private sector flip accommodation in three weeks and get it back into use while local authorities are taking eight months to do so? It is because a landlord who owns a rental accommodation cannot afford to leave it empty for eight months or two years. The Government can afford to leave it empty because there is no cost to the Government. Cost does not matter to the Government. Even the human cost does not seem to matter to the Government.

In addition, the freedom of information requests I submitted show there are 95,000 people currently on housing waiting lists across the country and 70,000 people availing of HAP, not to mention people on RAS, with €1.3 billion from the State's coffers going into the pockets of private landlords at a time of crisis. That money could be used to invest in building State housing stock that actually has an asset value that will last into the future but, instead, once paid over for rent, it is dead money that goes into the pockets of private landlords. Those houses come out of the private rental sector, which makes it harder for people in the private rental sector to get a house, which also pushes up the cost of rent for those houses.

Right now in Navan, in my county, there are only three properties for rent for under €1,500 a month, yet the local authority has 56 empty houses. Dublin has well over 900 empty local authority homes, while Cork has 500 and Limerick has 250. There is no urgency in this Government in respect of the housing crisis. Having empty homes in a housing crisis is tantamount to exporting food in a time of famine.

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