Martin Kenny (Sligo-Leitrim, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

This is an issue across the entire State. I am sure every one of us who is out canvassing or anywhere else will have seen the situation in local authority houses and other houses. There are many HAP tenants in privately-owned houses that are in very damp and very poor condition. The tenants have serious respiratory and other problems as a consequence. I recently visited a HAP tenant in a house in my constituency and brought with me a builder who knew the job and knew the situation. He told me the issue there was insulation. There was the cold coming in from the outside and there was the heat on the inside. What happens? Condensation. What happens when there is condensation? It creates dampness and the water flows down the wall. We see it everywhere, including in the black mould and the issues with rotten furniture.

I am aware of an incident that if it were not so serious would be amusing. A local authority staff member was called out to an elderly person who had their cabinets in their kitchen. The drawers were all broken, mainly because of the rot that was coming through because of the dampness. What did the builder do when they came out to fix it? They put three blank drawers on it to take the bad look off it and left the person with no drawers. If it were not so serious, it would be something that would be seen in a sketch on the television. These are the kinds of problems people are dealing with, but there are very serious issues out there as well.

I recently became aware of a situation where there was a couple in a house and the dampness was so bad and the problems were so bad that they were moving. They slept there only in the summertime. In the wintertime they went away to live with the man's mother because the house was so damp and so bad that they could not live in it. This has been reported continuously to the local authority. The local authority comes out and looks at it and says, "We will try to do something about it", but nothing ever happens.

Another issue in the context of all that is that many of these households are told that if another local authority house comes up soon, they will be moved to it and then they can get in on a scheme. That is one of the problems we have. They have to wait until they have houses empty before they will do work on them, and that needs to change. That is a note the Minister of State needs to take. People need to get the work done on their houses while they are living in them, not waiting until they move somewhere else or until they pass away.

My final point relates to insulation and the insulation grant. I came off the phone earlier this evening to a person who was looking to get the grant for the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland to wrap their house. They were approved for the grant and thought everything was fine, but then, when they went to draw it down, they were told, "Sorry, you cannot get the grant because in 2010 a previous owner of the house got wall insulation whereby the walls were pumped." The grant they got at that time was €400. It would cost more to inspect the house than what they actually got in the grant, but now they are being turned down to get this grant, having spent the money wrapping their house with insulation. There needs to be a serious look at how all this is happening for people around the country because this Government is simply letting people live in poverty.

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