Seán Crowe (Dublin South West, Sinn Fein)

House prices, rents, council waiting lists and homelessness are all rising. Any options for ordinary workers and their families are vanishing. Figures from the start of this month show there were almost 16,000 people in emergency accommodation. This Government cannot even be said to be making a dent in the figures. At the start of this year, there were fewer than 14,000 relying on emergency accommodation. At the start of last year, it was fewer than 12,000 and the year before that it was 9,000. None of these figures include rough sleepers, women and children in domestic violence refuges, those who are couch surfing or crammed into their own box room with young children or those who are sleeping in cars.

Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil excel in one thing and that is smashing the homeless record month after month. They have normalised homelessness. The Government has absolutely no handle on the situation at all. It is a runaway carriage and will continue to be so until the Government finally accepts it is a housing policy, the entire ideology of which has failed. It cannot even provide the water or electricity infrastructure needed to allow housing to be built. Urgent and real action must be taken to address the ever-deepening housing and homelessness crisis.

The Government must introduce the ban on no-fault evictions. This policy saw the first reduction in homelessness numbers in over a decade when it was introduced during Covid. The Minister stands up here and tells us his plans are working and that he cannot build homes overnight. The previous Minister managed to wheel it out during the last election with a straight face. We have been hearing it from Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil for more than a decade that it cannot be built overnight but when can they and when will they be built?

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