Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú) | Oireachtas source

There are 9,409 adults currently homeless in the State, and 4,105 children are accessing emergency accommodation. That is equivalent to the full population of the town of Midleton in Cork. It is a significant number of Irish citizens who are currently in a state of homelessness. There is the equivalent of 117 classrooms of children homeless at the moment. It is an incredible situation. There are 60,000 people on local authority waiting lists in the State. Eurostat has found that there has been a 100% increase in rents since Fine Gael was elected to government in 2011. House prices are out of reach for all but the wealthiest in society. It was reported today that the combined earnings of a nurse and a garda would not buy a three-bedroom semi-detached house in the greater Dublin area. If someone was one of two important public servants in this country and carrying out critical roles in the delivery of health or security, he or she could not live within the greater Dublin area. That does not just mean County Dublin but also Louth, Meath, Kildare and Wicklow. That person is condemned to commuter hell just to provide his or her services. This cancer of a housing crisis that has been allowed to exist for the past ten years is affecting every element of society and of the delivery of Government services.

The Government’s targets are half what they need to be. According to the ESRI, we need to be building 60,000 homes annually. Regarding the social housing targets, the first nine months of last year saw 2,642 new social homes built. The target was 9,100 for the whole year. Two thousand affordable homes were delivered in the first three quarters of last year, far fewer than the 5,500 targeted. Fine Gael has been in government for 13 years: Mr. Phil Hogan, Deputy Alan Kelly of the Labour Party, Deputy Simon Coveney, Mr. Eoghan Murphy and now Deputy Darragh O’Brien from Fianna Fáil. Every year, this crisis has steadily worsened.

We need to focus on a number of issues, the first of which is the number of deaths among homeless people. In recent years, we in Aontú have been to the fore in highlighting the number of people dying in homelessness every year. We have found out that, in the past five years, more than 400 Irish citizens have passed away in homelessness. That is an incredible record, yet it is just the number that have died in the capital city. No other local authority collects that detail at all.

That figure, therefore, is a multiple of 400 in its entirety for the State regarding those who are dying in homelessness currently. Those figures have got steadily worse since 2018. In that year, 47 deaths were recorded, while there were 49 in 2019, 76 in 2020 and 115 in 2021. It is heartbreaking to see this happening because if we look at the age profile of those who died, about two thirds of the people currently dying in homelessness in the State are younger than I am. These are lives that have been stolen from people who had enormous potential and should have had a significant proportion of their lives to live in front of them. It is an incredibly sad thing to see.

The Government commissioned a report from Dr. Austin O'Carroll, the north inner-city GP specialising in healthcare for marginal groups. He found that people homeless for 18 months had a mortality rate eight times that of people homeless for six months. Homelessness, therefore, is a cause of death. It is a significant element of the reason people are dying on the streets. This is an issue that is not being focused on and, indeed, when we have raised it, we have actually seen the Minister, Deputy O'Brien, try to downplay the statistics we have brought forward. In one response, he said some of these people were actually dying because of car accidents, for example. It is exceptionally important to recognise that homelessness is a cause of death and it needs to be tackled in this context.

About 100,000 people are in housing distress across the country now. Many people are paying the majority of their earnings either in rent or mortgage repayments. Tens of thousands of people are on the precipice of homelessness. These are ordinary people and workers who, basically, are one month's rent away from being homeless in the context of incurring the cost of repairing a broken clutch in their car or the potential pig ignorance of a landlord. The fact is we are living in a society that leaves families in such a precarious state. It would not take much to simply add in fixity of tenure and to be able to tell people that if they fulfil their responsibilities according to their contract in terms of paying the rent and ensuring the house is kept in good order, then they will be able to stay in that house for either a specific length of time, a ten-, 15- or 20-year period, or in perpetuity.

The Government, though, will not give that confidence to people. So many people are calling my office regularly and sitting in front of me in clinics and saying, "Peadar, I have no idea where we are going to go." They are in a state of panic and you can see the fear written across their faces. We are in the jaws of an emergency now, and what is the Government's response to it? This is the real issue I have. I have mentioned this next point before, namely, that I believe there is an extreme level of Government incompetence currently. Some of this is because the Government has been in power for so long, while some of it is because many people in Government have not held down a job outside of it for so long.

Looking at the situation right now, the response to a parliamentary question submitted by Aontú showed that, between all the local authorities, there are 3,500 local authority homes empty today. They are empty. Nobody is living in them. There are actually enough local authority homes existing for all the people who are homeless to be able to live in. Obviously there is going to be some churn in the number of local authority homes that are empty. This is natural. The point is that when private rental accommodation is flipped, it takes an average of three weeks for that to be relet to another family. What is the average time for a local authority house? It is eight months on average. It takes on average eight months for local authorities in this country to get such a property back into use. This is an incredible indictment of the level of administration happening in local authorities and the Government now.

The schemes the Government is providing are incredible. It has created this network of schemes, it says, to get people back into vacant houses. The idea that we have 160,000 vacant homes in a housing crisis is similar to having ships leaving this country with food in the middle of a famine. It is just atrocious that we would have this happening. The Government has created a fund to get vacant houses properly refurbished. It was launched in July 2022. So far, the number of people who have received a payment from this grant has been 70 in a year and a half. The grant has been paid out for 70 houses out of 160,000 empty houses in a year and a half. This means the Government is spending about €250,000 a month on grants to get empty homes back into use. The disparity in the proportion of the action by the Government to the size of the crisis is immense. It would take 3,300 years for the Government to get all these empty houses back into use if it kept delivering this particular grant at the same rate. It is an incredible situation.

Eviction is the other issue significantly feeding homelessness. I refer to no-fault evictions. We in Aontú submitted an amendment when the Bill in this regard was last discussed and voted on in the House to inject some level of compassion into the Government's proposals and to give a chance for the Government to help those in need. Our proposed amendment was very simple. It sought to provide protections against eviction for people who had fulfilled their responsibilities as tenants but who had a disability, were suffering from cancer, had a severe illness, were pregnant, had a very young child or were over the age of 65. Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and Green Party TDs voted against that proposed amendment. I feel that is an indictment of the Government's approach to this issue. It could not even make an exception in this regard.

During the period of the pervious Government, representatives of vulture funds got to visit the Department of Finance 150 times. When the finance committee asked representatives of those vulture funds to come before it, they appeared zero times. The vulture funds are a product of Fine Gael policy. They are creating excess demand in the system that is pushing up rents and house prices, and they are doing this based on paying no tax. It must come to an end.

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