Michael Collins (Cork South-West, Independent Ireland Party)

During the election, Independent Ireland said a housing emergency needed to be declared and everyone ran away. Now it seems as though we are rushing through legislation in the Dáil this week in a frantic bid to try to overturn the emergency that is there. There are 15,000 people without homes, which is a huge emergency for those in that dire situation. I am inundated every weekend when I hold clinics with people who do not have comes coming to me one after another. The local authority is coming to the point where if people have a roof over their heads, meaning the car roof, then it is okay and they are sorted. It is not okay.

I am not blaming the Minister. In recent years, the Government collectively has been asleep at the wheel. It needs to take responsibility and look at where we could have made changes. Some €148 million was announced today to take over a hotel in Dublin for an international protection accommodation services, IPAS, centre. There is a concentration on resolving that issue, even though the local community is up in arms over it, and rightly so. The problem we have is that modular homes, prefabricated homes and log cabins are needed for the 15,000 ordinary Irish people who do not have homes. Why are we afraid to look at that type of model? When we were growing up long ago, people who did not have a home stayed in a mobile home or whatever for a number of years until they got their feet under them. While legislation is coming and all this sort of talk is going on, action is not happening on the ground. While the Government is rushing through stuff, it is letting loads of other problems remain. Declaring a housing emergency would have dealt with that. Unfortunately, that latter has not happened.

The Government talks about infrastructure and funding.

We have not got the funding; it does not seem to be getting to the areas that need it. I will pick out five areas that I have often mentioned here in the Dáil, namely Dunmanway, Shannonvale, Rosscarbery, Ballydehob and Goleen. Some of them have been waiting for 25 years for a wastewater treatment plant. One town I always pick above the rest - maybe I should not - is Dunmanway. There is a super opportunity to deliver housing for the people there. Not one house can be delivered, however. The delivery of houses may have to wait until 2032 or 2034, which is astonishing. The Minister needs to come down there and have a look at what is going on. We know the scandal of raw sewage pumping into the local waterways, and it was mentioned last year. The bottom line is that we are no further on.

The same is true of Shannonvale, with raw sewage pouring into a local play park and seeping down into the local river. Apparently, that is no problem. If a local farmer up the road was responsible, however, he would be put out of business pretty quickly. It is the same with Rosscarbery and Ballydehob. In 1999, I was on the local community council in Goleen. I still am. We paid to bring in the property owners in order that we could negotiate a deal to establish a treatment plant there, but it never happened.

The whole country is blocked solid when it comes to movement. We are free to call a housing emergency, which is what this is. If we do not deal with it, we will be in the same situation 12 months, two years or five years from now. As I have stated more than once when speaking about housing, if we had put down two or three blocks in those days, we would have built thousands of houses. It has never stopped.

The left groups in opposition have joined together. Let them join away. I do not think they have the solutions either. They are dreaming. We are here as Independent Ireland, a stand-alone party that has put forward solutions. They are not magical solutions, but at least they can move this country forward. People are leaving our country. Young people left, right and centre are going out of the country left because they cannot buy houses and they cannot see themselves being in homes in the future. That is something we need to overturn.

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