Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

Fortunately, or unfortunately, in my rush, I have come in without glasses. I want to pick up from where I left off earlier. I thank Sinn Féin for this motion. It allows me to go into a little more detail, maybe with less passion than earlier. We had the report of the Housing Commission today and I look forward to reading the whole document. We already referred to the most important point made, namely, its call for a radical reset of housing policy.

I have stood opposite the Minister of State repeatedly begging and appealing to the Government to change tack. When homelessness reaches this level - I read out the figures earlier - there is something radically wrong. When we have a city, Galway, where a task force sat for more than five years and did not make a final report, there is something wrong. The task force was put into being because of continuous pressure from me and other people who were arguing that there was a housing crisis in Galway. I have been a Deputy since 2016. The task force was set up five years ago and there has been no final report. By comparison, Gaeltacht Uíbh Ráthaigh i gContae Chiarraí has a second report from a task force which has published findings and made recommendations.

There was nothing like that in Galway, just another layer of bureaucracy in a task force. I do not mean to cast aspersions on any member of staff but we did not need another layer of bureaucracy. We needed an analysis of the problem.

We have a report from the Housing Commission which we have not read yet, but the Minister has. He has not had it for weeks but for at least ten days. It is barely referred to in the document I have. The action called for by the commission is not even referred to in the speech. The Minister of State, Deputy Dillon, later did the same thing. He was the main Minister of State for this discussion. He pointed out that Housing for All is working. Imagine that. He said Housing for All is working. There are no houses available in Galway under the HAP scheme. Remember that the HAP scheme was brought in in 2014 by Fine Gael and the Labour Party. That was detrimental. It was the death knell as it copper-fastened the making of housing into a product to be bought and sold. It brought in the housing assistance payment and people came off a waiting list. In addition, if they were on RAS after 2011, they came off the waiting list. There were no rights. Everybody was on various schemes with no security of tenure whatsoever. Simon Communities Ireland does its report every quarter, telling us that absolutely no house is available under RAS. The only game in town in Galway city is HAP.

What am I doing as a representative? I am constantly raising the issue here and arguing that one part of the new policy, the radical rethink, must be to use public land for public housing and nothing else. This motion is about affordable housing. I can see why Sinn Féin is forced into it but there is absolutely no sense in talking about affordable housing when we have a system that is utterly reliant on the market for every single Government scheme, including the help-to-buy scheme, the equity scheme and so on.

I mentioned earlier that if hospital consultants are being helped by the help-to-buy scheme, fair play to them, because any scheme should be used by whoever chooses to use it, but would the Minister of State not think something is seriously wrong with the policy? If consultants need help to buy a house in this country, would that not sound an alert? If nearly 14,000 people are homeless on a continuous basis, with the figure getting worse, would that not alert the Government before the Housing Commission ever reported? If there is not one single affordable scheme in Galway city or county after five years of a task force, would that not alert it that something is seriously wrong with this policy and the previous policy, and the HAP scheme that was brought in? Between HAP, RAS and long-term leasing, over €1 billion is spent per year.

Tonight, we have members of the Government here and a Minister unable to take his head out of the sand and say that this is not a case of the Opposition playing games with the Government but the commission telling it that a radical rethink is needed, and many other things besides. He said this is working. It is working for those who are benefiting. It is working for the small number of developers who are holding onto land, as in Galway, or developing schemes to suit themselves at a pace that suits themselves, but that leaves out the element of social housing or affordable housing.

I have appealed to the Minister of State, Deputy Noonan, on a personal basis. I have acknowledged his bona fides. Still, this Government continues with a system that is rotten at the core. I say it as strongly as that. There is a reluctance to say that we have utterly failed.

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