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

All of us will be very familiar with people coming into our constituency office to show us photographs, as Deputy Gould did earlier. I thank him and Sinn Féin for this important motion. There is damp rolling down the walls and the windows. There is black mould in the bathrooms, kitchens and bedrooms. Clothes and bedclothes are made damp as a result. There is a prevalence of asthmatic conditions among children and older people. I do not know the extent to which this has been studied but anecdotally it is absolutely obvious there is a connection between the prevalence of asthma in working-class areas and council accommodation that is old, not well insulated or badly in need of retrofit and refurbishment. It is absolutely obvious, and it is outrageous that children, because of the conditions they are born in, develop serious asthmatic conditions. One issue really frustrates me because it happens again and again. When the maintenance section comes out to look at this, people are told to open the windows. I do not know how many times I have heard that. We have a back and forth between the council and the tenants, or the council and us advocating for the tenants, suggesting the problem is that people do not open their windows. How preposterous is the idea that if the windows are opened, it will solve the problem when, in many cases, we are talking about the winter months when it is freezing. That is not a joke. That is very often the response I get, and it is completely unacceptable. We need to do something about this. When the Minister of State spoke earlier about the increased investment and expenditure in this area, maybe he thought comments about how 25% of social housing stock is at B2 level were hopeful.

That means 75% of the 170,000 council houses in this country are below that level, and huge numbers of them are dramatically below it. People are living in poorly insulated homes, which very often results in damp affecting people's health and mental well-being, their children and the most vulnerable, whether the young, the old or the sick, because their homes are not properly insulated and have not been refurbished to the standards people should be living in.

In truth, the people who are sent around from the council are simply giving these explanations because they know the resources and budgets are not available, or because they are dependent on contractors, and it is about trying to get contractors rather than about councils having the maintenance sections they need to have, where there would be the direct labour of tradespeople, construction workers and people with the skills who could be directly deployed by the local authority. Instead, we are reliant on contractors, and that has to end. We need to rebuild our maintenance sections with the direct labour of tradespeople in order that we will not have to go through the added layer of having to procure contractors to carry out urgent repairs, refurbishments, housing adaptations, which were mentioned earlier, or whatever it might be. Elderly people, often with severe mobility problems, who cannot get into and out of the bath, for example, or where trying to do so is dangerous, are having to wait for a walk-in shower that is safe for them to use.

Turning to estate regeneration, at least in my area, it has long been identified in, for example, areas such as Sallynoggin and Monkstown Farm that some of the housing stock is totally unsuitable. What are known as the "maisonettes", or the "upsy-downsies", as some people refer to them in Sallynoggin and Monkstown Farm, were identified years and years ago as unsuitable. They are tiny spaces, almost all chronic with damp, and there are huge problems with the lack of soundproofing between units. Regeneration still has not happened to many of them, and people are living in absolutely intolerable conditions.

These matters are absolutely urgent, and I do not think the urgency is there. The Minister mentioned the budget increases but I took the trouble to look at the Estimates books for the past three years and the sum that has been allocated to energy efficiency was the same for the past three years, with an additional €2 million but that is a pittance. It was €85 million, it went to €87 million and then it was €87 million again. For planned maintenance, the figures were €30 million, €31 million and €31 million. There have been no significant increases. As for estate regeneration, the figure was €50 million for each of the three years.

Against the scale of what needs to be done, where 75% of the housing stock needs work to be done on it, such as improvements to the windows and the BER being brought up to the proper ratings, we have a long way to go. Certainly, in our area, a very small proportion of the old housing stock is up to standard. We need to invest more in this and have our own capacity to do it in order that we will not be reliant on contractors to the extent we are. Of course, all this, as well as the physical and mental health impacts on children, older people and vulnerable people, in many cases also means the poorest and most vulnerable people are hit with the biggest bills because, in a vain attempt to heat homes that are not properly insulated, people have to bang up the heating and spend ridiculous sums trying to keep warm homes that are not properly insulated or, in many cases, they cannot afford it at all, simply do not heat the home and sit there freezing, in some cases endangering their lives. They are certainly endangering their health and mental well-being, but in some cases, they are actually endangering their lives.

A hell of a lot more focus needs to go on this. We need to increase the levels of funding significantly above what they are for all these measures, whether retrofitting, estate regeneration or planned maintenance, and we need to recruit more people directly into the local authorities to do the work in order that we will not be reliant on contractors.

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