Rose Conway-Walsh (Mayo, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I listened with interest to the debate all evening. While I was listening to it, I got an email from a man in Mayo. I want to read a couple of extracts from it. It reads: "I am currently homeless. I have a full-time job. I am living out of my car in between work and seeing my four children. I have no money towards getting a deposit for a house. I am currently sitting in my car, with €30 to my name, in the wind and the rain, writing this email." That is while the Minister of State sits here and slaps himself on the back, saying Sinn Féin is not going to do it for that man or for the other men or women and children in Mayo. Fine Gael, not Sinn Féin, is the party that brought homelessness to Mayo. That is a fact, not like the nonsense that was being spouted by a colleague earlier.

Fine Gael has now been joined by Fianna Fáil in doing that, as more and more people are driven into homelessness. Month after month the numbers increase, and there is failure after failure to get to grips with the housing crisis. People are falling between the incompetency of Government and the bureaucratic system that paralyses local authorities from fulfilling their statutory responsibility to deliver housing. I am very short on time, but I want to say that not a single social or affordable house was built in Mayo in the first nine months of 2023. I struggle to understand how that is even possible. Every week all through 2022, we were told that everything possible was being done to build houses, for us to see each month; of the first nine months of 2023, not a single home was built. It was not until November that any houses were delivered. I welcome those and they are sorely needed, but it is far short of what is needed and far short of the modest targets. The Government said it would build 151 social and affordable homes in Mayo. It has not even nearly come close.

Many others are not even able to get on to the housing waiting list, on top of the 1,235 people that are on that list. Everyone suffers when the Government fails to deliver. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have designed and delivered a housing policy that continues to destroy the lives of many people in Mayo and other areas. The disturbing cost of the psychological damage being done to children, who have nowhere to call home, will impact generations to come. This will be the Government's legacy, the commodifying of desperately needed homes and the lining of the pockets of the vulture funds who continue to make millions on the backs of the people I am talking about.

See this speech in context