Paul Donnelly (Dublin West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Social Democrats for bringing forward this motion on the housing crisis. What does a housing crisis look like? Take my clinic in this week alone. On Monday morning, I had a single man who is working. He is living with his family and has nowhere to live. A family which is 12 years on the list has received a notice to quit and will be homeless in months. A family which is five years on the list and has absolutely no chance of getting social housing has received a notice to quit and will be homeless by the summer. A family which is 11 years on the list has received a notice to quit. This is what it looks like. That is what a housing crisis looks like. That is just my office. I guarantee that right across every single constituency, probably even including the Minister of State’s, people are coming asking for help and asking what we can do. When will the Government ever accept that its housing strategy has failed? Until it accepts it, this is what will happen every day.

Families and individuals - human beings - will be forced into homelessness. What does that looks like in Dublin 15? There is one homeless hub in Dublin 15 that has only recently come on stream. Where else do they go? They go to Clondalkin. They go to town. They go to Swords, Santry and all over the city. Where do their children go to school? They are still in the same place and they are forced to come back into the area every day, hang around and then go back again. That is the failure. That is what failure looks like.

There was a scheme - Deputy Ó Broin brought this up - which is the tenant in situscheme. It is a good scheme and it has helped people to stay out of homelessness. What we are getting now into our offices and the local authorities are telling us for the past number of weeks is that they cannot progress any more in the tenant in situscheme because the Government has failed to give them the targets for 2025. That is the reason people are going into homelessness. It is because the Government has not given the local authorities the targets to be able to move forward with them.

The restrictions on the tenant in situscheme make it really difficult for local authorities to engage with people who are willing to sell. There are landlords out there who want to keep their tenants in their properties and they want to sell them to the local authorities but it is caught up in so much red tape and so many delays that it is extremely difficult for them to hold on so they are pulling out of the scheme and they are going onto the private market. That is on this Government's head. I urge the Government to get its act together, get the targets, give them to the local authorities and let them get on with the job of keeping people in their homes.

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