Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

The Housing Commission has simply confirmed what the dogs in the street know, namely that the Government's housing policy is an absolutely disastrous failure. The catalogue of human misery that this failure is visiting on thousands of individuals, families and children should be well known to the Minister of State if he is knocking on doors. He could not possibly miss it, because house after house is impacted by one type of housing misery or another. Yet, the Government tables amendments to housing motions put before us and trumpets the success of its housing policies. That is an insult to the people in homeless accommodation and to those who have spent a decade or two decades on a housing list. It is an insult to working people who work hard, pay their taxes and have not got the slightest chance of affording the house prices that obtain at present or who are paying 50% or 60% or 70% of their income on the disgustingly obscene rents being charged.

A person will not find anywhere in Dublin to rent for less than €2,000 a month. It will more likely be €2,500 a month and, very often, €3,000. Who could afford this? Somebody is making a great deal of money. Let us not forget that. The people charging those rents are making large amounts of money. Ordinary people are being crucified with those kind of rents and robbed of the chance of saving for a home. In many cases, it is simply so far out of reach that they are living at home with their parents. Some are living at home with their parents and grandparents in outrageous Dickensian conditions that are reminiscent of this city at the beginning of the 20th century and the slum conditions decried by Seán O'Casey which led to the 1913 Lock-out. That is outrageous.

I will give some examples of people I am dealing with at the moment. Nicola, who had already spent six years in homeless accommodation, managed to get a HAP tenancy but is now being evicted along with her three children. Not being sufficiently high up on the housing list, she was told to find an alternative HAP rental. The highest HAP limit, as Members know, is €1,300. If a person is homeless, that might go up to €1,900. She has to find somewhere for €1,900, but no such place exists. What the person in this desperate situation, namely somebody who has already been homeless with her three children, is being told is that she is going to be homeless again, that there is no guarantee she will get own-door accommodation, that she may be sent into the city centre to a hostel because those responsible cannot even give her something in her area near where her children kids go to school.

Then there is Ellen, who has an OT report about her scoliosis. This means that she needs level-access living. She was refused medical priority even though the OT report says she has to have this. She was told to go and find a HAP tenancy that will suit her medical needs. We are now overriding medical professionals when it comes to housing needs and saying that because there are no houses available, these people are going to be told that they do not really have medical needs. Ellen has scoliosis and is living in totally unsuitable conditions.

Anthony has been homeless for 20 months. He has two children, one male and one female. They are all now in the same room together, facing into possibly their third Christmas in homelessness.

What about Amy and her husband, who is a bus driver? They are facing a no-fault eviction. Between them, they have an income of €48,000. This means that they are over the threshold for social housing. It is bad enough if you are eligible for social housing and are told that it will be ten or 15 years before you get a social house and then you have to find a HAP tenancy that does not exist. If you are a few thousand euro over the threshold, however, you do not even get HAP. This couple are absolutely goosed.

People may be told they are eligible for cost rental. However, there is only a tiny amount of cost rental available. This is the situation with Jane, whose income is €42,000. She is above the threshold for social housing but was eligible for cost rental when it came up in her area as a result of the income bracket she is in. Unfortunately, her income is not enough for the rent of the cost rental. She was therefore deemed ineligible on income grounds.

The position with Jimmy is similar. He is single dad with a daughter. His take-home pay is €46,000, which is above the income limit for social housing. He takes home €3,830 a month but that is not enough to pay rent of €3,000 a month. What about the cost rental? In terms of the income band, he should be eligible. However, on income grounds, the rent for the cost rental is too high because it is more than 35% of his income. As a result, he is ineligible.

The misery just goes on. What about V? I will just use the first letter of her first name. She is 65 years old and is forced to share a room with strangers at homeless accommodation. This has severely impacted her medical health.

What about another mother who is 38 and has a 12-year-old daughter, a ten-year-old son and a seven-year-old son with home she sleeps in one bedroom?

8 o’clock

The school has written to say the children are withdrawing such is the impact on their mental health. They have loads of letters from the doctors to say their mental health is in bits, but they have been denied medical priority. Parents are told that their kids may be absolutely destroyed by this experience and their own mental health may be destroyed by it, but that is not a priority because there are not enough three-bedroom houses, which is something I have warned the Government about.

Against the Government's trumpeting of its successes, what is actually happening in Dublin? What is happening is that apartment blocks are being built. Those apartment blocks are being bought up, mostly by investors. The development that has just been completed in my area in Blackrock, for example, where we were knocking on doors, has been bought up by investors for build-to-rent properties. Next door, there is a woman who said the development would be ideal for her son who is in his mid-30s and working but the investors have bought it. What are the investors going to do with it? They will either charge rents of €3,500, which no ordinary working person can afford, or maybe they will get some HAP tenants in and the State will pay, if people are lucky. That probably will not happen in reality.

What could we have done about that? The houses have been built. This is what is happening all over the place. We get 10% social housing, and the rest is totally unaffordable or is bought up by investors. There is one answer for what we could do immediately. We could say we do not need unaffordable housing. Instead of investors buying up these properties, vulture funds, investors and so on should just be taken out of the picture and banned from the Irish market. We should tell them they are not buying up the small amount of housing we desperately need in order to extort people with extortionate rents. We should tell them we are getting them out of the market, give them six months to leave the country and have the State step in and make sure every single unit that is delivered is either social and cost rental or affordable purchase. That can be done. We have the money to do it. It would save us money in the long term in terms of HAP if we did that. The more people we house permanently, securely and affordably, the more money we will save in the long run. In any event, we have a huge budget surplus.

We also need to get more people working directly on building social and affordable housing on the basis of what we need, not when private developers feel it could be profitable for them to build. The number of vacant or derelict properties or zoned sites they are sitting on while waiting until it suits in order that they can make enough money is disgraceful, and the Government will not do anything about it. These people sit on tens of thousands of vacant or derelict properties and huge amounts of zoned residential land and drip-feed them into the market as it suits them or, even worse, they leave them empty because they are appreciating assets that they can flip and make money off. That stuff has to be stopped. It is not being stopped because, to be honest, the Government is not interested in these people; it is interested in the speculators and developers.

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