Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein)

I commend the motion. This is the type of radical reset we need in terms of housing. I do not need to repeat the words said by my colleagues. This Government is failing badly in terms of housing.

I was at the Raise the Roof protest earlier and was struck by a woman who recalled the alleyways that James Connolly crawled through in the Easter 1916 Rising. She said an Irish man now sleeps in those same alleyways at a time when there are over 100,000 derelict and empty houses across the State and the Government is backslapping itself about how well we are doing.

Some €8 billion this year has been put into the rainy day fund. Next year, €6.5 billion will be put into it. The Government has not recognised from its ivory tower that it is not just raining but it is lashing on ordinary people the length and breadth of the country. The Government does not get what people are going through, whether it is the individuals Deputy Gould spoke about or people in my constituency who face eviction.

The tenant in situ scheme has been completely and utterly gutted. The hope and dream of a social house has been completely destroyed because the Government has gutted the ability of local authorities to build at the scale we need. Rents continue to creep up over and over again.

The Minister's master plan and big first initiative in his role is to do what? When rents are sky high and out of reach for so many people, his big brainwave is to put rents up further. He is only speaking to one audience, and that is the vulture funds and the institutional investors. It is absolutely shameful.

I stand in the Chamber and I am proud to be in the Chamber. I stand and I look at the heroes of 1916 around us. The conversation and comment outside really struck me. It is not just the homeless person who is in the alleyway that James Connolly crawled through; there are thousands and thousands of people in the country who are homeless. Thousands of children are homeless at this point in time, and tens of thousands of people in this country have lost hope because Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil have destroyed housing. They have commodified housing and looked at it as an asset as opposed to what it should be, which is a right. The motion is a manifesto for change and I commend it.

See this speech in context