Ivana Bacik (Dublin Bay South, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I wish all in the House a happy new year. The Minister and her Government are presiding over an abject failure on housing. This failure is devastating, particularly for those 13,514 people, including 4,000 children, who are in homelessness. That is a record figure and a shameful record. The housing crisis is also impacting on the hundreds of thousands of young adults living out of childhood bedrooms and the many thousands who are emigrating to Australia and other countries every year to find homes of their own. It is affecting thousands of people, including those I meet in my constituency every week, who are stuck in a rental poverty trap and cannot see themselves ever owning a home of their own.

The Government's housing failure is also affecting other policies and other services the State should and could be providing. We have a chronic shortage of teachers in our schools. We all know this. We have a chronic shortage of carers and educators in our childcare settings and there is a real difficulty recruiting medical staff for our hospitals. The reason in large part is that so many people cannot afford to live anywhere near their workplace or within a reasonable distance of it.

The abject failure in housing is also affecting other things. It is affecting our response to the humanitarian challenge we are facing because of the brutal war in Ukraine and the many wars and conflicts around the world which are forcing so many people to flee to our shores seeking refuge. We have always been a land of welcomes, from which so many of our own so-called unvetted males and females had to flee to find a better life in England, Australia, America and elsewhere. We know the Irish diaspora now exceeds our own population on this island by a factor of ten. Now that those seeking refuge from war or persecution are coming to our shores, we must offer a real welcome to them, just as we offer a welcome to those who come here to work and share their experience and expertise, the people who drive our buses, work in our hospitals and make our society better.

The reality is that across Ireland in the past two years, since that invasion of Ukraine began, our communities have offered a welcome to the many thousands of people who have fled here. Only in a small number of cases have we seen protests or opposition to new arrivals. I want to condemn outright the small number of very serious criminal actions we have seen committed, even in recent weeks in terms of arson, but also violence, intimidation, assault and threats. It is disappointing to see even Government party elected officials undermining the welcome effort. I am thinking of Mayo County Council's vote last night, for example.

The reality is that there is no refugee crisis. It is wrong to categorise it in that way. We do have a housing crisis and that is adding to the challenge of finding accommodation for our new arrivals. The Minister said it herself in response to the earlier question. The answer is that we do need to build more homes. The Minister said that. We need to increase the supply of our housing stock. We are hearing it from families living in hotel rooms, renters facing eviction and parents desperate to see their young people stay here and not move to Melbourne or Perth.

Why will the Government not take on the necessary ambition and urgency to deliver the homes the Minister acknowledges are so badly needed? Why will it not adopt the credible targets for delivery for housing we just heard the construction industry stakeholders calling for in the past week? We heard the Economic and Social Research Institute, ESRI, calling for it. Why will the Government not adopt credible targets for the delivery of housing?

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