Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have been in government for ten years, first through a confidence and supply arrangement in 2016 and then in two formal coalition Governments. During that decade, 55,000 adults have been forced into homelessness.

Let that sink in for a second. According to data from the Department of housing, from January 2016 to June 2025, 55,000 adults have been forced into emergency accommodation, funded by the Minister of State's Department. That is more than the entire population of Longford. It is more than the entire population of Drogheda, the smallest city in the country. It is more than it would take to fill the entire Aviva Stadium for any sell-out event. That figure does not even include children. It does not include rough sleepers or women and children in Department of justice-funded domestic violence refuges, people with refugee status trapped in direct provision or the hidden homeless. Fifty five thousand adults have been forced into homelessness during the ten years Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have been in Government. That is a truly scandalous figure.

On Friday, we will get the latest Department of housing homelessness report. The last report we got told us that at that point in time, 17,000 adults, including 5,000 children, were in emergency accommodation. The number of adults homelessness was up 13% on the year and the number of children up 15%. Every single category of homelessness was up; adults, families, singles, children and pensioners. In a country awash with surpluses and filled with talent and capacity, tens of thousands of people have been made homeless. There is a very simple reason. It is the failure of Government housing policy and successive Government plans by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. It is not rocket science. The fundamental problem, of course, is a chronic underinvestment and underdelivery in social and genuinely affordable homes.

If I hear a Government Minister once again telling us that they built more social homes in 2024 than in the 1970s, I will pull my hair out. The population in the 1970s was half what it is today. We had a surplus of public housing. A person on a council list would be housed within two to three years in the 1970s. Today it is more like ten to 15 years, depending on the local authority. If the Government was serious about matching 1970s output, it would be delivering twice the volume of social homes delivered last year.

Not only is the Government underdelivering on social affordable homes, it has also completely botched the regulation of the private rental sector, making it even more dysfunctional than it was in the beginning. There is a virtual absence of spending or programmes on homeless prevention. Just 5% of the annual budget that goes into homelessness is directed towards prevention programmes. The previous Government failed to use the breathing space of the emergency ban on no-fault evictions from 2022 to 2023 to do anything different. It ended that ban in 2023 with no proper contingency measures in place. That is why homelessness is rising year on year.

It is remarkable that in the two speeches we have heard, there was not a single acknowledgement of year after year rises in homelessness for a decade. What is worse is the new Minister, the new Government and the new housing plan are making things worse. There is no meaningful increase in new-build social and affordable homes in the new Government's housing plan. It is nowhere close to what is required.

The Government has just introduced probably the most controversial reform of rent regulation, which is going to bring us back to double-digit inflation and that is going to drive even higher levels of homelessness. We published an analysis, based on Residential Tenancies Board, RTB, figures, showing that 25% of all tenancies registered every year are new tenancies. That is approximately 60,000 households. That is the potential scope of new tenancies to be captured by the market reset. From the RTB's data on new and existing tenancies, we have shown that the cost of that is somewhere between €3,000 and €5,000 of extra rent every year. When we published these figures the Government told us we were not telling the truth and that we were exaggerating. Thankfully, the largest landlord in the State, IRES REIT, has published its own analysis. It believes the consequence of the market rent reset will be a 25% increase in its rental intake over a number of years, with an extra €21 million. IRES REIT's turnover is about 14% a year. This means that over seven years, if those trends continue, all its tenants will be captured by the market reset. In fact, based on its figures, its tenants, captured by the Government's reset, will be paying almost an extra €6,000 a year in rent. What this report actually says is that we, in Sinn Féin, were conservative in our estimate of the impact of this on renters, starting from Sunday. Simon Harris had the brass neck to come into this Chamber earlier and say he was on the side of renters. How does hitting renters with an extra €6,000 per year for IRES REIT tenants from March square with that claim?

We are also seeing a Minister whose first act this time last year was to slash funding for the one homeless prevention programme that was actually working, namely, tenant in situ. We finally got the figures and we now know last year there were just over 700 social housing acquisitions. This is half what it was the year before. That was the only programme where if somebody on a social housing waiting list, or who was eligible for cost rental, and was at risk of eviction, it could be prevented. Yet the Government pulled the rug from under our local authorities, undermined the scheme and introduced restrictions to cut the funding. As a consequence, there are people today who are in emergency accommodation and at imminent risk of homelessness because the Government took the funding away. I just cannot understand how the Minister of State could countenance that.

On top of all that, I did not hear either Minister of State mention the programme for Government commitment to end homelessness by 2030. I did not hear either one outline any new initiative to prevent homelessness or to get people out of emergency accommodation more quickly. What does that tell us? It tells us that with the Government continuing with the same failed policies that have pushed 55,000 adults into emergency accommodation over a decade, those numbers are going to continue to increase. That is what has been admitted to through the omissions here today.

Crucially, it does not have to be this way. It is possible to end long-term homelessness. The solutions are all around us. We need an emergency package of measures to reduce presentations and increase exits, an emergency ban on no-fault evictions, increased funding for tenant in situ and a doubling of Housing First tenancies. Sinn Féin made a specific proposal to introduce emergency planning and procurement and new building technologies to provide a dedicated stream of additional social housing to end homelessness for the over 55s in a single year and dramatically reduce adult and child homelessness year on year.

Crucially, we need to see a doubling of investment in delivery of social and affordable homes. We need to see a removal of the red tape imposed by central government to accelerate that delivery. In real terms, we need about 25,000 public homes to be delivered each year comprising social, affordable rentable and affordable purchase. Those homes need to meet need. They need to be based on an objective assessment of what is required. That means more one-bed homes and more larger homes. It means more homes for people with disabilities and, crucially, an increase in allocation of council homes for those in emergency accommodation. There also needs to be a far greater focus on child and youth homelessness. The strategy ends in 2026 and most of the commitments have not been implemented and we do not know what is going to happen after that.

When I hear the Minister of State, Deputy Christopher O'Sullivan, talk about progress, it confirms to me that this Government is in complete denial. The claim that tackling housing and homelessness is the number 1 priority is not only dishonest but it is an insult to the people being forced into emergency accommodation. When the Government is not insulting them, it is blaming everybody else. First it was Covid, then it was the war in Ukraine, then it was net migration and now it is the councils, the communities or the Opposition. Everybody else is to blame for year-on-year rising homelessness but Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. I repeat that in ten years, 55,000 adults have been made homeless by these parties.

The question I want to end with is: how many more people have to become homeless? How many more adults, children, singles, families and pensioners have to become homeless before the Government accepts that the problem is its failed housing plan? It should start to implement the alternatives we all know would work but it simply will not listen to us. Is it 65,000 or 75,000 or will the Government let it go to 100,000? If the Government does not make a change, that is where these numbers are going.

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