Aodhán Ó Ríordáin (Dublin Bay North, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I thank all those who have contributed to our debate on housing today. It is the great civil rights issue of our time, the ability to live in safety and security. We thank the Minister of State for not opposing the motion and for his comments on the Labour Party. The Minister of State referred to solutions on a European level. I believe that is where the housing Minister is now. We agree. The Government needs to be working on a European level to find pan-European solutions on affordable housing. We need to change the state aid rules to enable local authorities and national governments to fund housing solutions. We need to have a greater crackdown on the scourge of short-term letting which is really hurting many European cities and especially hurting Dublin.

Dublin, as a modern European capital, is really falling apart on the Government’s watch. As my colleague Deputy Howlin said, we have an inability to keep basic public servants living and working in Dublin. I have visited schools that are operating on 45% staffing capacity because they just cannot get teachers. Teachers cannot afford to live in Dublin. It is similar in healthcare and An Garda Síochána. We fundamentally cannot get people to live and work in Dublin. We have constantly called on the Government to reflect what has been happening in London for the past 100 years, where there is a London allowance, and have a weighted allowance for public servants and others to live and work in Dublin, but it is crushing for a young person or couple. We meet them every day of the week as we knock on doors and meet multiple generations of the same household at absolute breaking point because they cannot break out of that. There is a level of humiliation for people in their 30s living in their parents’ home, still living in their childhood bedroom. You cannot form a relationship. You cannot raise a family on that basis.

My final point is about children. On the very formation of Dáil Éireann, the first document produced was one for the new republic. It stated that the first duty of the republic would be the welfare of the children. At Christmas less than 18 months ago, the number of children in homelessness was 3,500. There was a national outcry at the time about the numbers of children in homelessness. At that stage, the no-fault eviction ban was still in place. The Minister of State said, as have others, that it was not working, that it was adding to homelessness, but since it has gone, in the time since Christmas 2022, we have a statistic for homeless children of 4,100. It has gone up 600 in little more than a year. I want to impress on the Minister of State how crushingly humiliating that is for every single child, because we are not just talking about numbers on a sheet, as Deputy Howlin said. We are not talking about empty strategies that will potentially fix this in five, ten or 15 years' time. We are talking about 4,100 stolen childhoods.

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We are talking about stolen dreams and the absolute humiliation of a child in that circumstance. Can you imagine what flashes through a child's head in school every day when the topic of homework comes up and he or she does not even have that? Some 4,100 children are in that scenario. That has been added to and compounded by the Government's decision to lift the eviction ban. The stats speak for themselves: 3,500 children were homeless almost a year ago and the number is now 4,100. There is no homeless agency, advocacy group or family with children who will tell you that the lifting of the eviction ban was a good call and the right thing to do.

While we appreciate the Government is not opposing this Labour Party motion, and while we appreciate also some of the comments the Minister of State and others made on it, that is cold comfort for any child who is on that list of 4,100 children who need accommodation, or those families living in multi-generational situations in a family home in Dublin, or those public servants and others who cannot afford to rent in that city. The Government has solutions but it has not taken on board what we have constantly said about putting the humanity back at the heart of this debate, nor has it realised the massive responsibility it has when it takes decisions such as ending the eviction ban without properly ramping up investment in social and affordable housing.

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