Donnchadh Ó Laoghaire (Cork South-Central, Sinn Fein)

One of the things that people cannot get their heads around regarding the housing crisis is how an issue can be top of the political agenda for so long but everything is still going in the wrong direction. How can it be the case that Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have been in government for so long and the crisis has escalated and escalated? We are here discussing a set of emergency measures that are needed. "Emergency" is a word and words matter. They represent a situation. What is fundamental is that neither this Government nor the previous Government have treated the housing crisis as an emergency. They have treated other policy areas as emergencies. We know the capacity exists to respond to issues in an emergency manner but the housing crisis has never been treated as an emergency. In fact, the vast majority of measures the Government took that we welcomed were ones it had to be coaxed, cajoled and dragged into, and then it ended up resiling from them in any event.

Look at the tenant in situ scheme. I know the Minister will respond that the tenant in situ scheme is not closed off and so on. We hear Government Ministers saying they are only targets but this is a classic example of where councils meet targets and are left hanging. This Chamber could have been filled with people from Cork city alone who were prevented from becoming homeless by the tenant in situ scheme, but because the Government is not funding it properly, people have ended up homeless. I know and have met people in my clinic whose homes were sale agreed with the Cork City Council until the Government pulled the rug from under it. More importantly, the Government pulled the rug from under those people who could now be in a council tenancy. Instead, they are in emergency accommodation. That is the reality of it; the Government's policy is doubling down on the bits that do not work and is casting aside protections. The Government has thrown fuel on the fire and now it is ripping out the fireguard. That is the reality of the situation - record rents, record homelessness and record house prices. It is all going in the wrong direction.

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