Cian O'Callaghan (Dublin Bay North, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I thank Sinn Féin for tabling this motion and giving us the opportunity to discuss these important issues around housing. There is one question I have asked myself and that I wish to pose here. When the Government states that it thinks its Housing for All plan is working, does it really believe that? Is it that disconnected from what is happening in people's lives or is it just Government messaging or spin at work when it says it believes this policy is working? If the Government does believe this, then it must be utterly disconnected from and unable to see the reality of what is happening right now. It must mean the Government does not see the situation that renters are in, where rents are increasing year in and year out above the legal amount the Government has set down in law but where the legislation is not being enforced and renters are afraid of being evicted into homelessness and, indeed, are being evicted into homelessness. The Government must not see the children growing up without a home if it thinks its Housing for All plan is working. It must not see the great numbers of people in their 20s and 30s still living in their childhood bedrooms and who have done everything they can in terms of education and work, everything previous generations would have done, but still find themselves not being able to make the transition to living a full and independent life and get on with family formation or whatever it might be because of the reality of their housing situation. The Government must not see, although we all certainly meet their parents, the people who have emigrated with the skills we desperately need in our public services and health services. We do not have them because they could not find anywhere affordable to live and have emigrated. If the Government really believes its mantra that the Housing for All policy is working despite record levels of rent, house prices and homelessness, then it must not be able to see people who are struggling in all those housing situations all across the country. Otherwise, the Government is simply misleading us by saying it thinks the housing policy is working. If it were able to see the reality people are living in, it would realise that its plan is not working. How would it be possible to say this plan is working in the context of any of this evidence?

If the Government continues to repeat the same lines and the same spin, there is a real danger it might start believing it and that it will not have a handle on the real situation and its human impact. I just want to give one example of this human impact. We all meet people all the time who are under massive stress stemming from this housing crisis. This takes a great mental toll and an equally great toll on people's relationships, their family relationships and their whole sense of well-being and independence. This situation can have very negative health consequences for people. Some of these can be very serious. When the Government says this plan is working, then, I wonder if it is really aware of the damage being done to people on a human level.

I will give one example of a person who has been struggling with the housing crisis. Paul Cambridge is 23 years old. At the onset of epileptic seizures, Paul lost his job and then his home. He spent two years sleeping in a car parked outside two empty houses on the south side of Cork city. Of course, if the Housing for All policy were working, then there would be enough housing supply to allow people who lose their jobs due to a situation like that experienced by Paul Cambridge to not become homeless. If the Government were doing its job, we would not have homeless people sleeping outside empty houses.

We have put forward several solutions. We said we want a vacancy tax with teeth. We brought this forward but the Government has not done it. Even if we look at the Government's buy and renew scheme, where empty and derelict houses are bought up by local authorities and turned into social homes, we were only at a level last year that was a quarter of what it was in 2018. Let us think of how much worse homelessness has become since 2018. In terms of this buy and renew scheme to turn vacant and derelict homes into social homes, that could be put into use to ensure that people like Paul Cambridge would not be sleeping outside empty homes for two years, this Government's performance is one-quarter of what was achieved in 2018 and then its tells us it is doing a good job.

I wish to raise one thing about the spin the Government is putting on this issue. It has to do with the local authority homeless performance reports. These reports have very good data but I want to take some time to talk about the title used for them. Referring to them as homeless performance reports makes it seem as if they involve some sort of standardised financial reporting or something like that. It is like this is some sort of a business saying how well it has done in its performance. What we are talking about here is normalisation. What should be getting published are local authority homelessness eradication reports and not our performance on how we are doing. Surely this suggests that we are okay with homelessness just increasing month after month.

With that said, there are good and important data and information in the homeless performance reports from the local authorities. The one for the first quarter of 2024 gives important information about how people are becoming homeless. One of the key drivers, and the reports back this up, is people being evicted from the private rental sector in no-fault evictions. The people in these situations have done nothing wrong. They have paid their rent on time every month. If they lived in most other European countries, they would not be homeless.

Renters who pay rent cannot be evicted from their homes. Under this Government, however, with a record level of homelessness, renters who pay their rent are being evicted into homelessness. Of course, this is something the Government could stop if it wanted to. That would reduce the number of people becoming homeless. Then we could have homeless reduction reports being published, as opposed to homeless performance reports. That the Government is not doing this is down to a political choice. No-fault evictions work to stabilise the rental sector and reduce the number of people who become homeless. If the Government was serious about reducing homelessness, that is one measure it could take straight away.

Countries that do not allow no-fault evictions, have big, thriving rental sectors. Their rental sectors are larger than ours, and there is lots of investment available. The sky does not fall in, and those in the rental sectors - landlords, tenants, renters and so forth - continue to go about their business.

I want to address a point about Government spin. When the Government talks about what causes homelessness, one of the lines it uses is that one of the key drivers of homelessness is the breakdown of relationships. It is trying to paint a picture to the effect that it is not responsible and that it is somehow the fault of the person whose relationship has broken down. In other words, that person, who is feeling pressure or stress because they has broken up with their partner, is somehow responsible for the fact that they have become homeless. That is the narrative that the Government is trying to portray when it refers to people becoming homeless as a result of breakdowns in relationships. Not that it should matter what type of relationship breakdown it is, but what the Government does not tell us - the commission's report shows this - is that the key family relationship that breaks down and leads to people becoming homeless is that between the person who becomes homeless and their parents. Why is that relationship breaking down? It is because of the massive stress and pressure when three generations of the same family are living in one house or where entire families are living out of box rooms. There could be ten people using one shared bathroom and one shared toilet. That kind of overcrowding puts people under massive stress and pressure. That is one of the key drivers of homelessness. When it refers to relationships breaking down, the Government does not tell people that. It likes to portray matters in a way that indicates something else is going on and that the people who are suffering from this stress have some sort of responsibility for what is happening to them, when it is the dysfunctional system that is actually responsible. Yet, the Government has the audacity to tell us that Housing for All is working. It is not working.

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