Louise O'Reilly (Dublin Fingal West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputies for bringing forward this motion. I also take a few moments of my time to thank my colleague an Teachta Ó Broin for the honest, straightforward solutions and focused proposals he has consistently put forward. Before I came in here, I called Marian, who is my constituency manager. I got her to run through just the cases that have come in during the last couple of days. One concerns a woman I met myself. She has multiple sclerosis and has been on the housing list for 14 years. It has been seven years since she was granted medical priority. Her living conditions in her home, the place where she is living now and in receipt of HAP, are making her condition worse.

The Government's housing policy is making her sick. She cannot transition out of an inappropriate location into appropriate housing, although she is waiting years. Her family have been watching her suffer in pain for years. The Minister of State can imagine how she feels when she hears him and others say that the Government is going to build 40,000 houses. That was until we subsequently found out that he got that figure from the same place as the lads in Anglo Irish Bank got theirs. It is utterly disrespectful that the Government has not had the decency to apologise to people like my constituent who is being made sick by its policies.

I have lost count, as has Marian, of the number of cases we are dealing with of people who are out this year. When they ring us they all have the same question, which is: "Where will I go? What are the options?" It is awful to have to tell someone that, unfortunately, they may have to look at emergency accommodation, because they know what such accommodation is. In fact, for decades we have been looking at documentaries about the hell that is emergency accommodation. It is bad for a single person, very bad for a young person, awful for an older person and disgusting for a family with children. Can the Minister of State even imagine what it would be like to be raising his kids in a hotel room? We should perhaps think about that.

I fully appreciate that the senior Minister cannot always be here, but it is somewhat disrespectful that he could not find time to be here. I respect the fact that he may have had another meeting but, again, this is the very start of a new Dáil term and already we can see patterns emerging. I urge the Minister of State, Deputy Chris O'Sullivan, to take a message back to his senior colleague which is that his housing policies are making my constituents sick and that those constituents that are sick are getting sicker. We need a change of policy not more defence of the Government's nonsense figures, and most definitely not more lauding of Housing for All, which is clearly not working.

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