Ivana Bacik (Dublin Bay South, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I begin by offering my deepest condolences also to the family of the late Garda Kevin Flatley, his wife, Una, his children, Aoife and Erin, his entire community and his colleagues in An Garda Síochána. On behalf of the Labour Party, I pay tribute to Garda Flatley and the dangerous work he did, and all his colleagues do, in front-line policing. We all owe them an enormous debt for keeping our communities safe and we all think of that as we hear the awful news of his tragic death.

I also express sympathies to the families of the two young boys, Emmanuel Familola and Matt Sibanda, who died so tragically in a drowning incident in Buncrana, County Donegal. Those tragedies really brought home to us the dangers posed by water and the risk of drowning.

To have just one home lying vacant during a housing crisis is unforgivable but the level of vacancy and dereliction in Ireland today is an outright scandal. Approximately 160,000 homes are lying empty across the State or, rather, we think that is the number lying empty because the truth is that we simply do not know. On every street in every town, we see vacant buildings, vacant houses and voids, which are visual evidence of the failure of Government housing policy. We were all reminded of it yesterday with the news of the collapse of a terrace of Victorian cottages in my home area. Just along the Grand Canal, as morning commuters travelled to work and school, a terrace of houses, ironically, owned by and right adjacent to the Construction Industry Federation headquarters, collapsed. It was embarrassing for the CIF, for sure, but it was lucky that nobody was injured in the collapse. Emergency services had to be called to clean up the mess.

That is just one stark example of the scourge of vacancy and dereliction. Vacancy blights more than just streetscapes because whenever I raise it in this House, as I have many times, I see vacant stares on the Government side. Nobody in government seems to know the scale of the problem. It simply does not know how many empty homes there are in the country and the already minuscule tax on those homes is not being paid by those who are sitting on them and failing to put them to use. The lengthy bureaucratic compulsory purchase process has been simply ineffective in tackling this issue. It is not as though this is an issue that has just crept up on the Government. It should, by now, have worked out how to find out the scale of the problem and, crucially, how to tackle it. Yet. five years since Fianna Fáil took on the housing brief, no one in government is showing any ambition to get to grips with the problem of vacant homes. so we get vacant stares, vacant ministerial offices and vacant Government policies. We are told the Central Statistics Office is researching the extent of vacancy over past years and that will be welcome. What we do not know is how the Government will use that information.

Weeks ago, my colleague, Deputy Conor Sheehan, in a parliamentary question, asked the Department of housing to explain why vacancy has not been tracked but that portion of the question was not answered. When will we see the Department of housing take on the basic task of determining how many homes are lying empty? When will we hear from the Minister for housing about plans to tackle dereliction and vacancy and to supply local authorities with adequate funding so that they can take on this task?

See this speech in context