Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, Solidarity) | Oireachtas source

People Before Profit strongly support this motion. We thank Deputy Healy, not only for bringing forward this motion today but for years of pushing the necessity of legally recognising the housing emergency as an emergency and the necessity for radical action.

The motion contains the kind of emergency measures that the Government should have been implementing ten years ago. I was first elected in 2014. That year, there was a similar motion which called for recognition of a housing emergency. It was rejected by the Fine Gael-Labour Government. At the time, when we were rightly saying it was an emergency, 3,607 homeless were people living in emergency accommodation. Ten years later, the housing crisis has escalated so much that there is more than four times that many people trapped in that terrible situation. This morning more than 4,600 children in one of the richest countries in the world woke up in emergency accommodation.

For most of the past ten years, the Government parties have insisted that housing is its top priority. I do not know how they managed to keep a straight face through most of that but actions speak louder than words. Two years ago this week, the Government lifted the eviction ban. We predicted what would happen, and it did. There was a massive increase in homelessness from 9,825 in March 2023 to 15,378 at the end of February - a jump of 57%. The truth is that the whole time the priority has been to increase property prices so that landlords, landowners, developers, vulture funds and banks can keep making profits.

I am not sure that the Government is even pretending that the housing crisis is a top priority anymore. Ten years ago, the then Government had a target of ending long-term homelessness by 2016. Then it was ending the use of hotels for homeless people by July 2016. There is no target for ending homelessness now. In fact, it is the reverse; the Government seems absolutely content to watch the homeless figures go up, month after month. The only time it gets concerned about them is when an election is coming and then it lies about the numbers and it delays putting them out.

The latest example of the Government's could-not-care-less attitude is its reckless suspension of the tenant in situ scheme. The effect in my constituency and right across the country has been to take away the only thing standing between families and homelessness. There are families already in this process for many months. The average waiting time is a year. They had agreements with their landlord. They had been told they were finally to get their forever home; now they have had that cruelly snatched away from them by the Government. In one case I am dealing with, the person has been going through this never-ending process for 18 month but now everything is paused. She is facing into homelessness for no other reason than the Government is dragging its feet, presumably in an effort to cut the cost of the scheme. We know that the new budget will buy a lot fewer homes than the old one and that the point of the restrictions and prioritisation being imposed is to make sure that fewer people get it. The Government must reinstate this scheme immediately and increase the budget to the level needed to provide for everyone who needs to access it. That is what it would do if it was serious about addressing this crisis.

Of course, the Government has no problem handing out ever bigger wads of cash to landlords and to operators of private emergency accommodation. That is what the threats to abolish the rent pressure zones are about - removing any and all limits to rates of profit in the housing market so that rents and prices can skyrocket even further. The Currency reported last week that, in 2023, the Government paid private property owners €140 million for emergency accommodation. A typical example is €1 million a year for tenement-style accommodation on Gardiner Street in Dublin where the State is paying through the nose to warehouse more than 1,000 people in a giant slum. One of the slumlords listed, Joe Somerville, who was paid more than €1 million a year by the State for emergency homeless accommodation in 2022 and 2023, has a history of illegally evicting tenants in order to turn their homes into emergency accommodation. It is not an isolated example. The owner of TramCo in Rathmines has been attempting to do the same - illegally evict long-standing tenants to turn the building into homeless accommodation. This has been thankfully stopped for now by action by the tenants supported by the Community Action Tenants Union, CATU. That is the kind of grassroots action in a mass movement that we need to beat this Government.

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