Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE) | Oireachtas source

The housing and homelessness crisis is spiralling even further out of control. It is destroying the lives of thousands of families and children across the State. In South Dublin County Council, 1,452 people were registered as homeless in November, including 653 children. All three homeless hubs in Tallaght are now permanently full. We do not just have a social housing list anymore, we have an emergency accommodation waiting list. Every day as a consequence, families are being sent miles away from school and family support networks into Gardiner Street where, on just one street, the Taoiseach's Government has forced more than 1,000 people to live their lives in slum conditions in 21st century tenements. I met a family a couple of weeks ago with six children and the eight people have been living in one room for over seven months. There is one toilet and no cooking facilities. Whole families, hundreds of them, are in conditions like that for up to two years. Children are growing up, learning to crawl, walk and run, in a single, dingy room. The councils' job used to be to clear the tenements by building social housing and moving people into decent homes of their own. Instead, we are now going backwards. We need to go forward again by building council homes on public land.

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