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

We have been asking for this debate for eight or nine months and I have got four minutes. I will try to make a few points about the generality of the housing crisis and the failure of the Government to address it, yet I have no choice in the little time available to me but to raise a specific issue with the Minister which I hope he will take on board, namely, the St. Germaine apartments in Ballybrack village. They are social housing managed by the Co-operative Housing AHB. It is a community of approximately 20 or 30 households. Like most people who are allocated a social house, they had been waiting many years to get their social homes. They were delighted after all that long wait to get them only to discover that these newly completed apartments were in a dire state. I have raised this matter with Co-operative Housing. There has been some engagement between the tenants and Co-operative Housing over the deplorable state of these apartments, which were built by a builder called Kavco, but the situation continues to be unbearable for the tenants. I am asking the Minister to step in. The point is that, even though it is an AHB, the tenants asked me to point out that they were allocated from the Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown council list. Therefore, the Government, the Department of housing and the council should take responsibility for what is going on. It is deplorable. They described the situation to me today and I went down and saw some of it myself. In new apartments, there is black mould in most if not all of the apartments. There is damp and maggots eating off the wet plaster in the apartments, fizzing sockets and wires, and a lack of proper fire safety in the development. There has been no proper independent survey of what is wrong, but it is really bad across the entire development. There has been no independent survey or resnagging of the building to find out what the hell went on. We now hear that some residents are being moved out while others are not being told what is going to happen. The place has turned into a building site again. It is appalling. Will the Minister look into this and talk to Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council and get to the bottom of it? Families, children and so on have waited all these years only to be in an appalling situation. This should not happen in social housing that is funded and allocated by the State.

The Minister may have seen a wider problem I have raised recently as regards much older council properties in Sallynoggin, where residents are living with mould and horrendous conditions, and their children’s health being affected by this, yet they are being forced to still live in these properties.

I will say this on the generality. The Government deceived the public during the election about the number of houses that had been built. Even as far as what it said it was building but did not really build, the commission says we need twice that. If we need twice what the Government is delivering, then we need twice as much social and affordable housing. That is not what is in the programme for Government, which only proposes a marginal increase in the amount of social and affordable housing, with actually no mention of affordable housing at all. There is a major problem with people going over the thresholds for social housing and then being ineligible for any support. These things need to be addressed.

The Government has to stop the flow of people into homelessness through no-fault evictions. It is an absolute scandal.

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