Louise O'Reilly (Dublin Fingal West, Sinn Fein)

It sometimes strikes me that if it was not for incompetence, there would be no competence at all with this Government. There are 15,500 people homeless. Of those, 5,000 are children. That is evidence for anyone with eyes to see that the Government’s policy is failing. They do not need us to tell them - Government members should be able to see that for themselves. I am sure they do not go home in the evening when they have finished work and think they are proud of those homeless figures. I am sure that when they reflect, they are ashamed. I hope they are. I hope that sometimes they have time in their day to think about kids who are growing up in emergency accommodation who will find themselves ostracised in school because they cannot have people over for sleepovers and they cannot have a normal life. Despite the Government’s best efforts to normalise this housing crisis people still have a memory of what it was like before they destroyed it. People still have some residual memory of what it is like for a young person to be able to aspire to secure accommodation, be it rented or accommodation they can purchase.

Yesterday, there were thousands of people outside this building protesting about homelessness. One of them was my father. Fifty-six years ago, he was a member of the Dublin Housing Action Committee. That was a group of people who came together to fight for the rights of people to decent and secure housing. He has said to me a few times that he did not think he would have to be back on the streets again, but that is exactly where he has to be. That is where people will be next Saturday in Cork at the National Monument at 2 p.m. because they want the Government to know they are angry. They also, and this is really important, need the Government to understand that as hard as it might try to normalise children growing up in hotels people will not allow that. The Government tries very hard to make people accept that on the last Friday of every month, it rambles out and announces the latest homelessness figures. That was not a feature when I was growing up or when the Leas-Cheann Comhairle was growing up. We know that is not normal at all. The Government can try but it will not succeed because people remember what it was like to have a functioning housing market.

In my constituency of Dublin Fingal West the latest Daft report tells us rents have gone up by 7.2%, in case the Ministers do not know, in a rent pressure zone. The average rent is now €2,371. The Government built affordable houses - you would laugh if it was not so serious - in my constituency that cost over €500,000 each. When replying, the Minister might tell me who exactly is affording that? When he was labelling those houses as being affordable, what kind of income did he have in mind? What kind of people does he think are going to be able to afford that accommodation?

Shortly before the election, I met a family. They had been evicted from their accommodation in Swords and were living with her family in Lusk. It was massively overcrowded. Everyone was squeezed into one bedroom. They have good jobs. These are normal jobs. They are not big-money jobs, and certainly not big enough to get into the circle of people the Government cares about. The people in question work hard. I have spoken to them recently and they tell me they cannot find anywhere to live within their means. They cannot afford a mortgage and, because of the way house prices have gone up, they do not earn enough to buy a house and they earn too much to qualify for housing assistance. They are literally caught in the middle. They ask the simple question of who are the Government policies supposed to help? They are not helping them. We can see they help vulture funds, investors and people with big money to buy loads of property and rent it out but who is it that the Government is supposed to be helping? I really hope he accepts the amendments tabled by my colleagues in order to ensure that at least something is done. However, he knows what the impact of putting RPZs in place where rents are already massively out of control is going to be. I urge him to listen to what the Opposition is saying, engage on the amendments and support the those that will make this legislation stronger and that will at least make a small difference in the lives of the people who are in desperate need.

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