Maurice Quinlivan (Limerick City, Sinn Fein)

We are in a housing emergency. This is an ongoing crisis that this and previous Governments have failed to come to grips with. They have not even acknowledged the scale of the crisis they have delivered to us. Later this evening we will debate a motion on the huge number of vacant council homes that lie derelict, but this crisis extends far beyond that. Renters face extremely high rents of €2,405 per month, on average, in my home city of Limerick. Those in the market to purchase a house in Limerick can expect to pay €320,000 on average for a semi-detached three-bedroom home. This is an increase of 10% since December 2023. Those who are in the unfortunate situation of having become homeless find it increasingly difficult to extract themselves from that nightmare. Every month there are more people availing of State-provided emergency accommodation. The latest figures show that 15,500 people - of whom 4,775 are children - are in such accommodation. That figure does not include those who are on the streets or those who are moving night to night from couch to couch because they do not have a place to call their own. Service providers in Limerick have repeatedly told me over the years that they have to turn people away from their doors every day as they do not have capacity. The failure to tackle runaway rents, allowing no-fault evictions, the failure to curb the cost of house purchases and the inability to provide secure accommodation to those on our housing lists impact families and particularly children.

I have absolutely no doubt that a future Taoiseach will stand up in this Dáil and apologise on behalf of the State for the way we have treated children in emergency accommodation and, for many of them, destroyed their potential for growth. These are real people impacted and children damaged by our housing failures. There have been far too few housing completions to make any impact on the number of Limerick people in need of housing, and the cost of rental properties also plays a role in this regard. In some cases, three generations of families are living under the same roof in already small homes. There are families working off rotas as to when an adult child can avail of a bed or must content themselves with a couch. This is the 21st century and we have families living cheek by jowl in these conditions. Why? It is because house prices are out of reach of the average worker, private rent is too expensive and the list for council-provided homes has people waiting years to be housed. Against this crisis the Government did act and brought in the useful tenant in situ scheme, but it has now cut it and it is not working for families. It is a housing emergency and it needs to be treated as such. As my colleagues have done, I encourage everybody in the Munster area to come to Cork on 21 June and stand up and demand housing.

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