Louise O'Reilly (Dublin Fingal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Speaker after speaker will tell the Minister of State that the Government is out of touch and, clearly, it is. I will give an example from my own area, because I think the Minister of State's knowledge of the facts is slightly less than ideal. I have two offices: one in Balbriggan and one in Swords. I am the only Deputy in my constituency who offers that, so naturally I get a lot more traffic through my office than most.

I will give two examples to the Minister of State. There is a young couple who I know fairly well, and I know the people who lived in their house before them. Their rent went up by 15%. I went to them and said they could take a case to the RTB, because it is fairly clear-cut. We had the rent book from the previous tenants, so it was very obvious that the RPZ limits were breached. They were terrified. They are a young couple with two kids and they were absolutely petrified. This is a fairly clear-cut case, but they would not take it. Do you know why not? It was because this is a landlord's market. It is a landlord's market that has been facilitated by a landlord's Government. This couple does not have a hope of earning €127,000 between them so that they might be able to buy one of the Government’s unaffordable homes.

Likewise, a young mother with two kids has been in emergency accommodation before. She got her notice to quit. She came to my office, looked me dead in the eye and said: “Louise, as God is my witness, if I have to go back into emergency accommodation, I will take my children, I will leave them with my mother, I will go back to the house and I will burn it to the ground with me in it”.

That is how terrified she is of your emergency accommodation. Even what you have there to support people is not working. By any measure, homelessness is up. House prices are out of control. Rents are spiralling out of control. Your targets are pathetic. Your plan is not working. It is time for change. If this Government is not prepared to facilitate young people who need a secure place to live, it should get out of the way and make way for a Government that will.

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