Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The motion before us today is about homelessness. I think it was very telling that the Minister, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, spoke for ten minutes, and only 30 seconds of that were about the issue of homelessness. I counted it on the clock. When the Minister of State started to speak about this same issue, he talked about the recent rise in homelessness. The Minister of State has been in government for 12 years. Every single year since his party has been in government, seven of them propped up by the Tánaiste's Fianna Fáil, homelessness has increased. Despite the fact that the Government claims record levels of investment, record levels of output and historic records of social housing, homelessness is now at its highest levels ever. Contrary to the Minister of State's claim that we do not propose alternatives, and I probably have more housing policy documents and legislation published than almost anybody else in this House, we put a number of very basic propositions to the Government. They were sensible suggestions to reverse the damage the Government's housing policies are doing to men, women and children who are being forced into homelessness.

We proposed increasing the social housing targets. We got no answer and no response. We suggested using emergency fund procurement powers and new building technologies to supply a further additional stream of social housing, exclusively for people who are in emergency accommodation, to accelerate the exits which collapsed in recent years. We got no response. We said we need to prioritise homelessness among the over 55s, which is at its highest level ever and is one of the most shocking indictments of this Government, and also to prioritise increasing the exits of families with children, because no child should spend two or three years in emergency accommodation, and that is what the Government's housing policy allows. A very simple proposition is to double the Housing First tenancies. We have the highest level of single people in emergency accommodation in decades. The Government has a target of around 240,000 Housing First tendencies a year. It is a good scheme and I supported it before it was this Government's policy. We should double the target to 500,000 and accelerate the exits. We have also proposed that as the number of people in emergency accommodation are reduced, which is something that would happen if Sinn Féin was in government, we should ring-fence the money that is currently spent on emergency accommodation and increase investment in supports to sustain tendencies and prevention. We got no answer to that. We want the Government to expand the tenant in situscheme and, crucially, to fix the problems with the scheme in the cost-rental tenant in situ. It is not working. We told the Government the same thing over a year ago with social rental tenant in situ. It ignored us and lost valuable time. Do not do it a second time.

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