Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú) | Oireachtas source

There are now 13,179 people in emergency homeless accommodation in Ireland. The number of children in emergency accommodation is 4,000. The total population of emergency accommodation is equivalent to the whole population of Midleton in Cork, a full mid-size town in Ireland. If we look at the number of children who are homeless in the State, it is equivalent to 171 classrooms of children. We should let this sink in. It is an incredible figure.

Given that Fine Gael has been in power for 13 years, the Government has been in power for four years and housing is a self-declared priority of this Government, it is incredible that in each of the key performance indicators when it comes to housing this Government's performance is getting worse.

Incredibly, the Minister, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, released the homelessness figures on the same night as "The Late Late Toy Show". I am not sure if that was by accident or design. If it was by design, it was incredibly cynical to try, potentially, to hide the figures. If it was by accident, it shows in stark relief the difference and division that exists in this country between the haves and have-nots. A response to a freedom of information request I submitted this year showed that 20 people died in homelessness in Dublin in the first four months of this year, five of whom were under the age of 30, including one child. This means two thirds of the people who have died in homelessness this year were younger than me. That is a chilling statistic coming from Dublin City Council in respect of deaths among homeless people in Dublin. In the past five years, 400 people in homelessness have died in Dublin alone. These are human beings we are talking about who should have the same right to life and human rights as us. This is just the case in Dublin. If we extrapolate that figure to take in the whole State, we can estimate that 1,400 people have died in homelessness in Ireland in just the last five years.

It is incredible that the Government does not even record the number of people who die in homelessness outside the capital city. If the Government is not even researching this figure or collecting this information, it a very clear sign of where its priorities lie in terms of the housing crisis and the value it attaches to these people. Today, 1,400 mothers, fathers, sons and daughters are lying in a graveyard in large part due to the homelessness crisis in Ireland.

As I have said previously, the single most obvious trait of this Government is uselessness. It is completely unable to deliver on capital projects, with housing the perfect example. This is important, and I will give the Minister of State an example. Right now, across the country, 3,500 local authority homes are vacant. That is enough vacant homes to house everybody in homeless accommodation. It is an incredible figure. To show the Minister of State how useless the State in these terms, it takes eight months for the Government to turn around a local authority home so that it can be relet. Meanwhile, it takes three weeks for a private rental unit to be turned around to be relet. The fact that it is taking so long to turn around local authority homes is a failure in public administration, which is costing lives.

Again, it is worthwhile to do the maths on this. I went onto daft.iebefore this debate and found there are 2,156 houses to rent in the entire State. This is another incredible figure. It is, however, lower than the number of empty local authority houses, even though the number of private homes for rent is double the number of local authority homes. The number of empty local authority homes is well above the number of empty private homes. This again is an indicator of a dysfunction that has enormous consequences for people's lives. The figures are incredible. If we use a filter on the search function in daft.ieto specify private rentals costing less than €2,500 monthly, only 1,150 such homes are shown to be available in the whole State. When we apply a filter of €1,500 monthly or less, we find there are only 623 homes available.

In my town of Navan, which has a population of 35,000, only eight homes are available to rent. If this is not the definition of a banjaxed housing system and a market that is completely broken, dysfunctional and not working, I cannot imagine what else is. The Government is spending more than €1 billion on the HAP and RAS, rental subsidies that do not provide one extra unit of accommodation to the State and have the effect of pushing up rents in the private market. The Government is not fulfilling its responsibility. It is not getting the easy stuff right in terms of vacant homes. It needs to change its policy on addressing the housing crisis.

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