Maurice Quinlivan (Limerick City, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Gabhaim buíochas leis an Leas-Cheann Comhairle. I thank Deputy Seamus Healy and his colleagues for bringing forward this motion. I have been in the Dáil for nine years and have been listening to speeches from housing Ministers in that time. I listened to the Minister’s speech today and, unfortunately, I do not think he was even interested in delivering it. He did not seem to believe in what he was saying. We are in a housing emergency but the Minister and the Government will not actually admit it.

I wish to raise two issues in the short time I have, the first of which relates to homeless services in my own city of Limerick. Every single night of the week – and we are into the second year of this now – homeless services are full. We are short of spaces and people are being turned away every single night. All the hostels are full. I had to ring the out of hours number for emergency accommodation the other night due to a house fire of a local authority tenant. She was made homeless due to an accidental house fire. I was told they had no access to funding outside of office hours. How ridiculous was that? The council then came back to me and said it had to wait for a fire report before it could house the person. The house was actually burnt down. I saw it myself; it was actually burnt to the ground. That is an easy demonstration of how chaotic and how under-resourced it is. While the staff who work there do their best, they cannot do it without the resources. The Government has not given the resources. As we speak, and in the context of the figures the Government recently gave us, there are 500 adults and 224 children in Limerick city in emergency accommodation.

The second issue I wish to raise with the Minister, which I raised with him before, is the issue of local authority voids. For people who do not know what they are, they are local authority houses that are boarded up. It is not fair on people who are waiting on housing lists to see those boarded up for a number of years. It is very unfair to people living next door to them because they often become, as I said before, magnets for antisocial behaviour, litter dumping and all sorts of stuff.

In response to a parliamentary question given to me last week, the Minister said, “Under the voids programme, there is no upper cap that can be spent on an individual dwelling [and here is the crux that comes] providing the overall average per dwelling of €11,000 is maintained.” That means local authorities do not have money to do it. The Minister is well aware of that. I am asking him to change that. He also committed to review that. The sooner he does so, the better.

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