Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú) | Oireachtas source

The homeless crisis in Ireland has reached a historic and harrowing breaking point for so many families. The figures currently show that 16,734 people are trapped in emergency accommodation. That is a record-shattering figure, representing a 12% increase year on year. However, it is actually only a fraction of the truth if we add in rough sleepers and the 290,000 hidden homeless - the families who are squeezed into garden sheds, those who are couch surfing and living in overcrowded flats or the adults who are in their 30s, regressing into childhood bedrooms because this State has outsourced the right to a shelter to what is market forces.

The Ombudsman for Children has documented many complaints and reveals what I would call a systematic institutionalisation of children in this State. One mother described her children's silence, noting that her son had stopped speaking entirely because of the regimented prison-like experience of guards and roll calls in their so-called home. In these hubs, families of five are actually confined to single rooms. The ombudsman reported that children are not making their milestones, such as crawling or walking, just because they simply do not have enough floor space to be able to get moving. In some of these areas there are floors that are damp and rooms full of people that are full of mildew. There is the noise of strangers, heard through paper-thin walls.

The school run has become a marathon for many kids, who have to get up at 5:30 a.m. to get to the school in the area where they lived originally. One parent talked about their child having to eat a dry breakfast out of a plastic bag at a bus stop, just be able to get to school on time. Teachers are reporting the phenomenon of homelessness fatigue because children are having to travel such distances from the temporary homeless hubs to get to the original school they were in.

I had not heard of the term "kettle cooking" until recently. A generation of children are now growing up on pot noodles, tea and instant pasta prepared on the floor of their room on their bedside table. That is the nutritional content that we are investing in a whole cohort of children in this country.

Other children, because of the distance that they have to travel on buses to get home, are missing meal times in the hubs, and maybe missing the only hot meal of the day as well. Homelessness takes a psychological toll.

We see behaviour regression from children who were once independent. We are seeing documented cases of children aged eight, nine, ten, 11 and 12 years old returning to bed-wetting because of the instability of the situation of they are in and the proximity of strangers in hostels as well.

There is a profound sense of stigma for many of these children. Children and teenagers describe as a social death telling people that they are homeless. It is impossible for them to have a friend over, as well the effect that has on the socialisation of those individuals. They do not have a wall to put a poster on, a door to close behind them or a proper bed to sleep in at night.

Up until this situation, we were talking about people on low incomes but we are now actually talking about middle-income families in this situation. Incredibly, families who are on €30,000 or €40,000 and up to €48,000 in some places are being disqualified from housing assistance, leaving them in a situation where they are too wealthy to be able to get housing assistance but too poor to be able to afford rent and in the limbo space of being forced into temporary accommodation. It is an incredible situation. The Government refuses to change the income limits despite the realities of the cost-of-living crisis. This is engineering a section of society which is now falling into homelessness and that is policy-driven.

I want to just speak about some of the solutions for this because there is no point in just focusing on the outcomes of the Government's attitude. The Government's residential tenancies Bill will come into play on Monday. That Bill is designed purposely to raise rents. That is the objective of that Bill. The Government does that because it wants to attract investors. It does it because it wants to increase activation and viability. I do not know of any other government in the history of the State that has implemented a Bill whose primary objective is to raise rents. To do it at a time when families are struggling with absolutely astronomical rents is really hard to believe.

I accept something needs to be done on the viability question. However, at a time when the Government is putting €10 billion into a savings account on an annual basis, surely there is another method to make house-building viable. In my constituency there are heaps of builders at home who are doing nothing and are not building because it is not viable for them. The majority of the top 50 construction companies in this country are currently sending their workers abroad because it is not viable to build here in Ireland. However, in the North of Ireland there is no VAT on the construction of homes. There is no tax take by the state on the construction of homes in the North of Ireland. The Minister has already accepted that is an activation action by actually doing it for flats and apartments. However, that really only attracts the investment funds into that space. Imagine if it was done for house-building, for the people who are building their own houses or the families who want to get into a first-time house in their locality.

This Government is absolutely laden down with red tape and bureaucracy. I have mentioned this to the Minister a number of times before. Unless he actually gets to the heart of this, he will never fix this problem. We have the slowest planning, permitting, licensing, tendering and judicial review system in the whole of Europe. It takes a phenomenally long time to build anything. This is not just affecting the housing crisis. We cannot build flood defences, rail lines and the other infrastructure necessary to allow people to live, and that is a significant problem. The habitats directive has a big influence on that. However, it is also because the Government is not staffing the planning authorities or An Coimisiún Pleanála to the level they need. It is also because it puts layer upon layer of bureaucracy on the system year after year. If the Government does not tackle that, we are going to have a massive problem.

At the moment Ireland has 26 judicial reviews for every 1 million people. Britain has five judicial reviews for every 1 million people. It is becoming a national sport here. We have proposed a Bill to prevent vexatious objections to construction. Right now, if I live in the Minister of State's constituency in Cork, I can put in an objection to a person in Donegal building a slatted shed on their farm, which is an incredible situation. A person with no material interest in a particular project can put in an objection. People should not get me wrong; I understand that there are civic society groups that stand for proper planning and development and should have the ability to influence or put in objections. However, we need to start targeting vexatious objectors and the vexatious judicial reviewers in this process.

One of my biggest frustrations with this Government has been the type of debate that we have had on this issue over the years. It has been a very one-dimensional debate. It is happening between the Government and a certain section of the Opposition. We need to have a deeper debate on how we make house building viable in this country without putting the weight on the families who are looking to buy those homes or the renters who are looking to rent those homes. People need to be allowed to build in their own local areas. Until the Minister gets to address these issues, he will join a long line of about five or six Ministers who have crashed and burned in relation to the objectives of the housing Department. That is not the holy all of it. The main problem is the families who are made homeless as a result of that situation. There is a permanent government in place in relation to all these objectives. They are driving the bus and the Ministers present are simply passengers on that bus. Unless that changes, we will be back here year after year looking at the situation.

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