John McGuinness (Carlow-Kilkenny, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

We did not just arrive at these numbers overnight. This has been ongoing since 2011, I would say, and successive governments since then ignored all the signals that would tell them a problem was emerging in housing. Local councils even ignored it. They massaged the figures to make things look better and pretended there was no problem when, in fact, there was a massive and growing problem.

I was often criticised during those years when I raised the issue of housing and the fact that it was not being delivered at a pace to meet the demand. When I look back now, I think I was right about it. A year into this new Government, there is a dysfunction at the heart of all of this, and that includes Ministers and civil servants. An attempt is being made to ensure the voices of backbench and Opposition Deputies are not being heard in this Dáil. That is a terrible reflection on the Government. It is a weakening of democracy.

As we discuss this issue today, we have the Minister of State here to answer. There should be representatives from the Department of housing in the Chamber because they need to hear directly from every single backbencher who will contribute today. I attach relevance to and place emphasis on backbenchers and what they say due to the clinics that we do. What we hear and see at the coalface is being reflected in this debate. There will not be one single reply to any of us here from the Department or the Minister to say "You know what, I listened to the debate" or "I was told about the debate and I think your idea is worth exploring". Anything that we raise in this House in this Government term seems to be ignored because it is now more about spin and social media than about hard facts and delivery. That is my view.

Often, Opposition Deputies will tell us we are in Government, but that does not mean that we do not have ideas or that we cannot reflect what the constituents we represent say to us in clinics. I certainly will not ignore what they say to me and if that is criticism of the Government, then so be it because we are here to represent those who elected us.

The dysfunction at the heart of government has to be dealt with. I have never seen a time where there was so much money in the system, yet so little ability on the part of the State to deliver on most projects. I can always point to the children's hospital or to the issue we are discussing, for which there is lots of money, yet we still have a growing problem. There are many other examples of that and if the Government and the Departments do not recognise that, we will be in real trouble altogether.

I am going to reflect what I hear in my clinics. I want to look back and recognise the record of local authorities. Back in the 1950s, when there was little or no money around they built wonderful housing estates. These estates were not made up of modular homes but if solid, well-built houses. I was reared in one such home on O'Loughlin Road. I look back on it with great memories because the people who were allocated those houses made up the community based on a meitheal concept. That is how most people throughout the country got a head start in terms of their homes. The reason we cannot do that now is that we have loaded the system with bureaucracy and red tape, creating obstacles for everyone and anyone who wants to move forward. We are taking the future from our children by not ensuring that we deliver to meet the housing needs they are experiencing. In the main, I am talking about people who would qualify to receive council houses because that is where the relief needs to come.

I have never seen anything like the homelessness we have. It is shocking. I would never have said we would have homelessness in Kilkenny city or Carlow town, and we have. It affects not only those who fall out of society or have difficulty with engaging with society, but people who are earning money and have a job. It may be a low-paid job but they are working and cannot afford to get a house. They are often being refused by the council in a very inhumane way. They apply for a house and, with few if any reasons for refusal, the council sends them back all of their documentation in the post and says they do not qualify. Why can the council not do what most people in this House would do, and call them in to have a chat, rectify their application and approve them? I tell people that once they have been approved, there is no magic wand. They might be approved and get HAP but there are no houses to get.

Look at the housing stock the councils have. I wonder why there is no real effort to turn around a house that has been vacated and put it back into active residential use. I am told there is an issue with the cost of repairing and refurbishing these houses. That is a load of nonsense. There are many people on the housing list who are living in dire circumstances and would accept a house that might fall a bit short on some standards. They would do so in the hope that once they have a house, they will get it repaired in future. That does not happen, however, and nobody is accountable. At the end of the day, the Minister and his senior officials are accountable. Do we hear from them? No.

Downsizing or resizing is another issue. I know cases where people want to downsize from a three-bedroom house to a one-bedroom or two-bedroom house but the council does not have the ambition to make that happen. It just will not let that happen. The result is a family is left homeless, while one person living in a three-bedroom house who wants to move to a one-bedroom house cannot be accommodated. Council officials are often baffled and bewildered by the range of problems they are facing and the skill set is not there to reach out. Maybe the ambition of chief executives - I am not talking about any particular chief executive - is not there to work with the Ministers and civil servants to get this job done.

There was reference to adaptation grants. Around budget time, I asked the Government to make sure the shortfalls in the grant in every local authority were addressed. I asked that local authorities be given even more money to ensure people remain in their houses and that houses would be made available to disabled persons, freeing up other houses. That does not happen. I have seen more refusals on the basis of no funding being available. The Minister needs to make every single council accountable to us in this House.

The Minister has to insist they deliver on their numbers. Do not let the Opposition say now we are blaming the councils. I am not. I am simply saying they all have a role. They are all getting paid, so why should they not be accountable? That does not remove accountability from the Minister or the senior civil servants.

I cannot understand either why a council that runs into a difficulty with a tenant - I have an example of it in my county of Kilkenny - turns to evict that person. Whatever the reasons are for that, is it right to evict a family of six and put them on the roadside, citing succession rights, rent arrears or whatever it might be? Is it not a case where someone from the council should go to mediate? I asked for mediation in the particular case I experienced in Kilkenny and the answer was no. The council said it had a court order and it was evicting the person and the family. Do councils not get what is happening in society right now? You have a case where the council wants to increase the rent. Should the parents take in the family that cannot afford to pay a rent in the private sector? They go back home and lo and behold the council is on to the family immediately to increase their rent. There has to be some forgiveness in circumstances like that. A space has to be created to allow that family to assist their family members, sometimes with young children, and not be told their rent is being jacked up for that purpose.

All of the schemes the Minister has to give people the opportunity to buy their own homes are failing in part because people cannot get through the hoops that are attached to every single scheme. There is no one there to assist them and to say that if they did things a particular way, they might qualify for one scheme or the other. That does not happen. They come back to public representatives like all of us in this House and guess what? They have to fill out a two-page permission under GDPR so that the council officials can speak to us when we are trying to speak on behalf of a constituent who has come to us in the first place. We ignore that here. We do not do anything about it. We should do something about it. It is preventing us from doing our work. More importantly, it is preventing the officials from understanding the real-life experiences of people as explained by a public representative.

We are often treated with disdain. They do not want to communicate in a way that will expose the real problem and in a way that will give proper rights to the people we represent. These are all things that can be changed. The Minister should tell the council chief executives when they meet next that he wants a different or simpler form or that he wants to the word of a public representative to be taken when he or she makes representations on behalf of a client.

Choice-based letting is a good thing. I see a lot of people on the housing list use it but it is another measure that is restricting those who are not IT-literate. Nobody wants to talk to you in the council unless you are doing it by email or by CBL, and that excludes an awful lot of people. It excludes older people and it is not treating them with respect. That has to be addressed.

Single men and single women are probably the biggest number on the housing list in my constituency. I fight hard for each and every one of them because the last thing we want to see happen is that they would be trapped in private rented accommodation at the age of 60 and not be able to get accommodation. It is a downward spiral from there. Again, it is not understood properly by the local authorities and it is not being dealt with properly or funded properly by the Government. How many times have I heard, sitting in the Ceann Comhairle's chair, Members of this House tell the story about vacant properties? Every chief executive should be made account for the number of vacant properties on their books and there should be a timeframe given for them to work on it. I support everything that is said about the tenant in situ scheme. For God's sake, fund it and make it happen.

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