Gerald Nash (Louth, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I sincerely thank Deputy Ó Broin and Sinn Féin for bringing the motion before the House. It is unfortunate and, frankly, troubling that we have to discuss housing and homelessness so often in the Chamber but, as we are all aware, this is the sad reality. This is the issue of our time. It is very rare that you can point to a single issue and say that is what is uniquely holding our country back. However, as the President put it a couple of years ago, the disaster that is housing in Ireland is the single biggest barrier to making real progress in this country. The lack of affordable housing is preventing us from having enough teachers to fill our schools, nurses to staff our hospitals, and carers and educators for our childcare services. It is the principal reason and impetus behind our kids fleeing to Australia and Canada, or wherever else, in search of greener pastures. Young people who grew up here, were educated here, and would love under better circumstances to stay, contribute and make a life for themselves here, fairly ask why they would do so. What is here for them?

Thanks to the housing issue, the concept and principle of the social contract have been shattered and irredeemably broken. When I speak to young people, I am always struck by the hopelessness they feel regarding their prospects of ever owning a home. So many of them have already effectively given up. They are fatalistic about this and I can understand why. Even those with well-paying jobs who scrimp and save as much as they can are being priced out of the market. In some cases I have encountered in recent times, they are being priced out of the market because they are bidding against a local authority. At best, they are miles away from their family, friends and places of work, if they can afford a house that is quite distant from their family network in the first instance.

Secure housing is the bedrock of any sort of decent life. We need to reconcile the fact that more and more people are renting. How can we claim that any young person renting in Ireland has secure housing when his or her landlord can decide to sell and give him or her the boot at the drop of a hat? We simply do not have a secure, social democratic, European-style renting system. It used to be that someone would move out of the family home, would maybe rent for a couple of years, save up for a deposit, and then buy a place of his or her own. That was the expectation. It was a realistic expectation for most of our history of statehood. It was a modest but realistic ambition. Even that is now an unrealistic prospect for the majority of people. If they are not priced out of the rental market entirely, they are certainly paying such extortionate rent that saving for a deposit is virtually impossible. It is not just young people, as the Minister of State well knows. People well into their 30s, 40s and 50s are stuck in a rental trap with little prospect of ever having the security of a home of their own. As I said, the social contract is broken. The threads that hold that fabric together are being pulled away.

There is then the hidden homeless or those forced into couch surfing or living with their parents. How are these people meant to have any sort of decent and dignified life, if they have not got the security of a place they can truly call their own and are infantilised by living at home with their parents?

Their development is arrested. Their sense of progress, their dignity and their own self-respect is hammered. Homelessness is a product of this insecure system. It stems not just from a lack of supply of housing but a lack of affordable housing and a lack of secure housing.

Most damning of all, however, is a figure contained in this motion that we are all too familiar with, which is the 74% increase in the number of children living in homeless accommodation since this Government took office. That is the legacy of this Government. How could anybody in their right mind claim that Housing For All, the only show in town, is a success when we have so many children living in homeless accommodation? It is a shame of this Government. The homeless figures for December will be released on Friday and I dread to see the number of children who were in homeless accommodation last month. How many of them spent Christmas without a home? How many kids are doing homework on the floor of a homeless hub or a hotel in Dublin, Drogheda or Dundalk and right across the country? That figure of 74% represents an utter failure in the State's duty towards our children. This Government has failed on the basics. This motion does not ask for any more than the State to address the basics. It asks, for example, that we bring forward measures that would effectively ban investment funds from bulk purchasing homes. This is a reasonable ask and a reasonable request. Of course the funds themselves are behaving virtually unobstructed certainly from a tax point of view. We know - we have debated it here last week and ad nauseamover the last three years - that the 10% stamp duty surcharge was never going to have an impact and was never going to dissuade funds with deep pockets from engaging in the kind of activity they do.

The motion also asks that the Government amends its housing targets to reflect the real housing needs. We in the Labour Party have been sneered at for calling for an increase in the targets and for 50,000 houses a year for the next decade. That is not a figure that we just plucked out of the air. It is based on an unpublished report from the Government's own Housing Commission in 2022, which estimates that we require new builds of 40,000 to 60,000 a year. The Taoiseach has conceded that the housing targets need to and will be revised but he has intimated a 5,000 increase on the yearly target. This is insufficient and is a paltry increase given the scale we need. Less than two weeks ago the Economic and Social Research Institute concurred that targets need to be significantly increased by far more than the Government is now proposing, while the Irish Institutional Property organisation, hardly a bunch of unreconstructed lefties, estimates that the target needs to be closer to 60,000. What is more, the Construction Industry Federation has said that we can achieve that number.

I put it to the Minister of State, Deputy O'Donnell, that none of us takes any pleasure in watching the housing disaster unfold. That would be wrong, unseemly and unbecoming of us all. We all care about our housing policy. We all care about a housing strategy and we all care about the situation in which too many people in this country find themselves. We do not take any pleasure from this disaster unfolding: the month-on-month increase in homelessness, working people locked out of the housing market and our young people leaving the country in such numbers. They used to leave the country not that long ago in search of work. The problem then was an absence of work. We fixed that; we fixed the unemployment problem. We have created the conditions to create the kinds of jobs we have currently but the problem now is housing. The resources are there but the problem is that a realistic, sustainable strategy and policy simply are not.

The Opposition is trying to help. Let us look beyond the Punch and Judy stuff. We are trying to help and we are trying to be constructive. Nobody takes any pleasure whatsoever in the number of people who are homeless, the number of people who are on housing waiting lists, and the number of people who are waiting to buy their own affordable homes. We are trying to be constructive. Every other week there is an Opposition motion or an Opposition Bill seeking to be constructive to work with the Government on improving the disastrous housing situation. For our part, the Labour Party brought forward several motions and Bills in recent times. There was a Seanad motion to tackle vacancy and dereliction. There was a Dáil motion setting out how the Government could have used last year's winter eviction ban to ease the pressures of the housing sector on families. There was the Housing (Homeless Families) Bill to ensure that children are prioritised in emergency accommodation settings. I could go on. At every turn we have been met with resistance, in some cases with hostility, and outright refusal mostly.

I do not doubt that the Minister of State, Deputy O'Donnell, and the Minister, Deputy O'Brien, are serious in their commitment to solving the housing disaster, but they have tunnel vision on a failed housing policy. It is no shame to change tack and to change direction. It would be to the Minister's and Minister of State's credit and their Government's credit if they did. Homelessness continues to rise. Adults continue to be forced to move back in with their parents - if they were ever able to move out in the first place. Our young people continue to leave this country in considerable numbers principally because of housing.

We in the Labour Party also take seriously the solving of this housing crisis. I know that colleagues in other Opposition parties do so as well and there is no shame in changing course and taking on some of the measures that have come from the Opposition. We want to help and we want to be constructive but the Government has thus far refused to allow that to happen. This is a good and sensible motion containing measures that would, in our view, have a real and positive impact on the housing situation. I urge the Minister of State to take these measures on board.

See this speech in context