Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to speak on these statements on Housing for All. I would have thought the topic might have changed given the commission report. I look at the Minister's opening statement again, as I do with all speeches. I listen to them and I read them. I am told by the Minister that Housing for All is working. I cannot imagine how the narrative in this speech could continue after we have seen the leaked part of the commission's statement. We are told Housing for All is working. I can tell the Minister of State that it is certainly not working in Galway city. I speak today in the context of the second highest number of people ever being homeless in Ireland at 13,866, 4,147 of whom are children. That is the second highest number we have seen and we are being told the policy is working. In Galway, 288 adults are recorded as homeless.

The Simon Communities do a regular spot-check on what is available. In Galway city, there is absolutely nothing available within the HAP scheme limits, discretionary or otherwise. In our office, as in the offices of other TDs, we are busy putting on pressure to get people housed who have spent 20 years on a waiting list. They are lucky because they are actually on a housing waiting list. A myriad of schemes have been introduced by different governments and they do not know where they are. If you were put on the RAS after 2011, you no longer have a right to a social home. You are considered adequately housed and must go out onto the private market, where there are no houses. If you were on the RAS prior to 2011, you are on the list but those put on the scheme post 2011 are not. If you were availing of HAP, you were not on any list but then some parallel list was invented.

There are a whole myriad of nonsensical schemes and I include the help-to-buy scheme in that. I am at one with Sinn Féin if it is serious about scrapping that scheme. If our housing policy means we have to back consultants to buy a house in Ireland, although fair play to them for availing of the scheme, there is something seriously amiss.

We now have the leaked report from the commission, which calls for a radical strategic reset of housing policy and highlights ineffective decision-making and reactive policy-making where risk aversion dominates. It calls for emergency action to address the housing deficit and points out that pent-up demand, outside of population increase and people coming into our country, was never factored in. It also tells us the very lowest number of houses that are necessary. It tells us that, by comparison with our European partners, Ireland has one of the highest levels of public expenditure and yet one of the poorest outcomes. At a basic level, it calls for a targeted increase in the proportion of social and cost-rental housing to 20% of the national stock. It goes on.

There is something that we on this side of the House have repeatedly highlighted. I have highlighted it based on my 17 years at local authority level. The housing crisis was created by policies from various governments that were, as Deputy Berry has said, intent on making a product out of housing rather than a basic human right. In Galway, we stopped building in 2009 and did not build another house until 2020 or 2021. Even now, we are not building any affordable houses in Galway city or county. To add insult to injury, we set up a task force more than five years ago and, although we have changed the chairperson, who was another former Secretary General of the Department of housing, we have not had one report analysing what is happening in Galway city. It is just another layer of bureaucracy while the chair, who is now gone, repeatedly expresses disappointment at the failure of the local authorities to deliver. Do I blame the local authorities? No, I do not. The only thing I blame them for is not being honest with Government when we stopped building in 2009. They should have had the courage to tell the Government that this was the making of a housing disaster and that they needed to build houses. Since then, they have been run down even more.

Perhaps the Minister of State can tell us the current number of vacancies in the planning departments and housing departments? Yesterday, I received a scandalous letter from an official in the housing department. She could not give me basic replies as to where someone was on the housing waiting list. Does the Minister of State know why? This person told me it was because her department was understaffed, that it had more important duties than carrying out an assessment and that it could not give us basic answers. I apologise; I am over time.

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