Dáil debates
Tuesday, 17 June 2025
Emergency Action on Housing and Homelessness: Motion [Private Members]
8:00 am
Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein)
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I move:
That Dáil Éireann:
notes that: — the housing and homelessness crisis is getting worse;
— house prices, rents, council waiting lists and homelessness are all rising;
— the Government continue to miss their social and affordable housing target, targets that are too low to begin with;
— tens of thousands of homes are lying vacant and derelict in every city and county;
— the lack of affordable homes, particularly for essential workers and low paid workers, close to their workplaces, is impacting on the delivery of public services and undermining economic competitiveness;
— an entire generation of young people are locked out of affordable homes with the highest levels of emigration since 2015;
— growing numbers of people approaching pension age are living in expensive and insecure rental accommodation fearful of their future;
— the student housing crisis continues to deepen;
— the housing needs of Travellers, people with disabilities, older people and other marginalised communities continue to be ignored; and
— tens of thousands of homeowners and tenants continue to live in unsafe homes impacted by defective concrete block and Celtic Tiger era building defects; further notes that: — housing is a human right;
— the cost-of-living crisis is putting ever greater pressure on workers and families while access to key public services including healthcare, childcare, disability and special needs services places even greater financial burdens on communities;
— after 4 months in office it is clear that this do-nothing Government has abandoned communities;
— the Governments failure to invest in critical infrastructure such as water, electricity and under resourcing of the planning system is delaying the delivery of much needed homes;
— the chronic underfunding of our local authority housing and planning departments which must be reversed for councils to play their key role in meeting public housing needs; and
— instead of adopting a radical change of housing policy as recommended by the Housing Commission, they are threatening to remove protection for renters, proposing even more tax breaks to vulture funds, and further delaying the delivery of much needed social and affordable homes; and calls on Government to agree that: — emergency action must be taken to address the deepening housing and homeless crisis including;— a dramatic increase of investment in and delivery of public housing to meet social and affordable housing need;
— stronger taxes on vacancy and dereliction and greater use of Compulsory Purchase Orders to bring empty homes back into use;
— real action to protect private renters through freezing and cutting rents and no changes to Rent Pressure Zones that would increase rents;
— an emergency response to rising homelessness, including reintroducing the ban on no fault evictions; and
— fully restore and increase funding for vital homeless prevention schemes including Tenant In Situ and Housing First.
As we speak, there are several thousand people outside, comprising trade unionists, workers for homeless charities, housing rights activists, students, political parties, renters, aspiring home buyers and people experiencing or at risk of homelessness. I left them moments ago. They are gathered together as part of the Raise the Roof campaign to declare very clearly and loudly that like its predecessor, this Government's housing policy is failing, enough is enough and it is now time for emergency action. That is why Sinn Féin, joined by the Social Democrats, the Labour Party, People Before Profit-Solidarity and other Independents have come here today with a joint motion. The joint motion is very clear and straightforward. It calls on the Government to take a number of emergency actions now to reverse the damage the Minister and his colleagues have been doing and continue to do to people's housing situation.
In advance of the finalisation of the Government's plan, it needs to increase investment in and the target for the delivery of social and affordable homes. It is not just about money; it is also about reform in how those homes are delivered, a problem the Government continues to conceal from the House but everybody knows exists. The Government needs to take more direct action to support local authorities, in particular, to be able to bring vacant and derelict council and private homes back into use. Stronger taxes on vacancy, more efficient use of compulsory purchase orders and better funding for local authorities for bringing homes back into use are required.
Instead of doing what it has done last week and will do in the autumn, namely jacking up rents in the private rental sector even more, the Government should protect renters from rent increases and reduce the cost of rents while increasing supply of genuinely affordable social and cost rental homes. Instead of cutting funding for vital homeless prevention schemes, one of the Minister's first acts, he should instead restore and increase funding for the tenant in situ scheme, the housing first scheme and others. The Minister also needs to reintroduce a temporary and emergency ban on no fault evictions now, because the number of people entering emergency accommodation is too great and too few are able to exit.
That is the core of the motion before us today. That is the motion that the thousands of people, supported by the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, ICTU, the entire trade union movement, civil society and others are supporting as we speak.
The Minister has been in office for five months and we can already start to see the damage he and the people around him are doing to our housing system. I have already mentioned that he has cut funding for vital homeless prevention schemes. For the life of me, I cannot understand how that could be his first act. He has completely ignored the Housing Commission's call for a housing delivery oversight executive with emergency powers, underpinned by legislation. The Minister is giving us a toothless tiger in the form of a housing activation office, and he could not even put the head of that body in place.
In what is probably one of the most bizarre spectacles I have experienced in my time as a TD tracking Simon Coveney, Eoghan Murphy and the Minister, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, the Government has introduced the most haphazard change to the rent pressure zones, an imperfect protection in the first place. The Government has changed its story day after day and the fact the Minister is shaking his head means that I wonder whether he fully understands the implications for tens of thousands of renters of what he intends to do. Some rents will increase immediately and others over time at an even greater rate than has been the case.
All the while, house prices, rents and homelessness are rising and the Government continues to fail and slow down the delivery of social and affordable homes. People have had enough. They are taking to the streets in Dublin today, and at the National Monument in Cork at 2 p.m. Saturday. The Community Action Tenants Union, CATU, will hold a protest in Dublin on 5 July. There will be more and more until the Government changes the policy or, ultimately, people change the Government. It is one of the other, and people have come outside the House today to say they want to change and the Government either listens or it goes.
Thomas Gould (Cork North-Central, Sinn Fein)
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I want to encourage everyone from Munster and nationally to come to the National Monument on Grand Parade in Cork this Saturday at 2 p.m. for Raise the Roof for Munster and raise the roof for people who are crying out for housing. I will provide the Minister with an example of what he has done. I am not being personal, but the Minister needs to understand the consequences of his actions as the Minister for housing. I know a 68-year-old lady, Maria, whose family has lived in a house for 90 years, a house that was supposed to be purchased under the tenant in situ scheme. She will be evicted, at 68 years of age, because the Government gutted the fund and pulled the money. She has an adult daughter and cried when she has contacted me. Imagine the stress she is going through. What is the Government doing? She has worked all of her life and has done everything right.
Another 50-year-old lady cannot get on the social housing list because she is just over the limit and cannot afford to rent. She is caught in the middle. She asked me, "What must I do? I have done everything right. I went to college. I worked hard all my life. I am 50 years old and they are putting me into homeless accommodation". That is on the Minister. He is the Minister for housing. The buck stops with him. What will I or the Minister tell those ladies?
Does the Minister have any idea how bad things are out there for ordinary families and workers? People are praying to God that they will not be evicted and can stay with their parents. I will ask the Minister a question I asked the previous Minister for housing. How many children must become homeless in this country before he finally admits that his policies are wrong? It takes a man to stand up and say he made a mistake. This Government has made mistakes over ten years. As the new Minister for housing, will the Minister stand up and accept that we need a radical change in housing policy? Will he start it or will he do the same again?
Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein)
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I commend the motion. This is the type of radical reset we need in terms of housing. I do not need to repeat the words said by my colleagues. This Government is failing badly in terms of housing.
I was at the Raise the Roof protest earlier and was struck by a woman who recalled the alleyways that James Connolly crawled through in the Easter 1916 Rising. She said an Irish man now sleeps in those same alleyways at a time when there are over 100,000 derelict and empty houses across the State and the Government is backslapping itself about how well we are doing.
Some €8 billion this year has been put into the rainy day fund. Next year, €6.5 billion will be put into it. The Government has not recognised from its ivory tower that it is not just raining but it is lashing on ordinary people the length and breadth of the country. The Government does not get what people are going through, whether it is the individuals Deputy Gould spoke about or people in my constituency who face eviction.
The tenant in situ scheme has been completely and utterly gutted. The hope and dream of a social house has been completely destroyed because the Government has gutted the ability of local authorities to build at the scale we need. Rents continue to creep up over and over again.
The Minister's master plan and big first initiative in his role is to do what? When rents are sky high and out of reach for so many people, his big brainwave is to put rents up further. He is only speaking to one audience, and that is the vulture funds and the institutional investors. It is absolutely shameful.
I stand in the Chamber and I am proud to be in the Chamber. I stand and I look at the heroes of 1916 around us. The conversation and comment outside really struck me. It is not just the homeless person who is in the alleyway that James Connolly crawled through; there are thousands and thousands of people in the country who are homeless. Thousands of children are homeless at this point in time, and tens of thousands of people in this country have lost hope because Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil have destroyed housing. They have commodified housing and looked at it as an asset as opposed to what it should be, which is a right. The motion is a manifesto for change and I commend it.
8:10 am
Conor McGuinness (Waterford, Sinn Fein)
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Throughout the State, families are crying out for housing. If they are not crying out for housing, they are in our clinics crying to us because they are facing eviction or watching their children raise their families crammed into their childhood bedrooms, sometimes multiple families in the one home. They are the hidden homeless who are never counted in the figures and never make it into the headlines but they are homeless nonetheless. Others are only a paycheque or an eviction notice away from becoming homeless. People are in fear. The trauma in this country because of the decisions of this Government and successive Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael Governments is very real and will be felt for generations.
In my constituency of Waterford, the message going out is on the slow pace of housing delivery and the fact that a sod has still not been turned on applications made six or seven years ago. This will be the legacy of the Government and of the Minister unless he changes and, as Deputy Gould said, unless he admits the policies are not working. I suspect that they are working for some. They are working for those who are speculating, hoarding and profiteering from the housing crisis. That is who they are working for and it is time that people understood this. Out on the streets tonight, including the streets of Cork and Dublin, people are waking up to Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael lining the pockets of speculators, investment funds and institutional landlords at the expense of Irish people, the future of Irish families and Irish children who are in homelessness or only a minute away from it.
I dtaobh cúrsaí Gaeltachta, tá ár gceantair Ghaeltachta ag fáil bháis mar gheall ar an easpa tithíocht inacmhainne agus shóisialta, agus níl an Rialtas seo ag déanamh faic mar gheall air. Níl sé maith go leor. The Government has turned its back on rural Ireland. The national planning framework is a disgrace of a document. It wants to end rural housing. Let us be honest about this, in that the planning framework the Government has instituted and presided over is doing nothing to address the depopulation crisis in our rural communities
Joanna Byrne (Louth, Sinn Fein)
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I will begin by reiterating that, for the common good, I want every Government housing and homelessness policy to work. For every person on a housing list, for every one of the hidden homeless, for every family in a homeless hub and for all of those in emergency accommodation, I want the Government's policies to work. However, I do not know what way it needs to be communicated to the Minister for him to accept there is a housing and homelessness crisis and to the Government for it to understand that the housing and homelessness crisis will not go away and for it to acknowledge the housing and homelessness crisis will not resolve itself. It needs a change in direction from the Government.
The Government's failed housing policies have caused a big homelessness problem in the wee county. Louth, which is the 12th most populous of the 26 counties in the State, has the sixth highest level of homelessness, according to the latest figures available on the Department's website. I spoke previously to the Minister about the 35% increase in those needing emergency accommodation in just a year in my home county of Louth. It gives me no pleasure to state these facts.
Solutions are being put forward to the Minister if he would just hear them and accept them. According to the 2022 census, there are 163,000 vacant dwellings in Ireland. The housing list would be cleared and homelessness could be ended if the Government accepted our proposals and introduced stronger taxes on vacancy and dereliction and greater use of compulsory purchase orders to bring empty homes back into use. Rents would stabilise due to greater housing supply being available and our towns and cities suffering from dereliction would benefit. It is simple and effective and it would take great pressure off local authorities, such as Louth County Council, which have to chase rogue developers who sit on properties and allow them to go derelict until they see the opportunity for perfect profit regardless of housing needs, homelessness and the urban eyesores they have created. A wee change could do so much good, and for Louth, the wee county I represent, I implore the Minister to take emergency action.
Louis O'Hara (Galway East, Sinn Fein)
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Week in and week out, I have people in my clinics who are distraught because they cannot afford the cost of rent. A woman had to leave her home due to domestic violence and found herself and five kids moving in with elderly parents. A couple have to leave their home in two weeks' time and do not know where they will leave their personal belongings or their pets or whether they will be able to access emergency accommodation. There are countless families with children growing up in hotel rooms.
The average rent in County Galway is almost €1,700. It is more than €2,300 in the city. The Minister thinks this is not enough. He wants to hollow out rent pressure zones and allow rents for new tenancies to be set at extraordinary levels. Where is this going to end? Will it be when rents reach €3,000 per month? Will it be when almost all of our young people have left the country? What will it take for the Government to abandon its failed policies?
How are people supposed to afford these rents? How is it sustainable to continue to push them up even further? This is why people are protesting outside the building tonight; it is because the Government is denying them a future. It has normalised homelessness and it wants to squeeze every last cent it can out of hard-pressed renters. Not one affordable home has been delivered in my constituency. According to the Minister, the houses there are already affordable. We have had pitiful investment in housing infrastructure. The Government has gutted the tenant in situ scheme. There are dozens of empty homes in every town and village throughout east Galway that have been lying idle for years. These are all hallmarks of the Government's approach to housing. The solutions are staring it in the face but it chooses to ignore them. It is time for the Minister to wake up, stop making this crisis worse, stop increasing rents and start investing in infrastructure and affordable housing.
Mairéad Farrell (Galway West, Sinn Fein)
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I heard the Taoiseach's remarks yesterday at the national economic dialogue, and I have to say never in my life have I heard such reality-defying words. He told us that fundamental reform was being delivered that was creating a sustainable housing system into the future. We have a Raise the Roof rally outside the Dáil today. If we did a survey of all the people there, and of all the people who were renting, they would disagree terribly with these words, which are so completely out of touch.
The Minister has heard an awful lot of real-life stories from these benches today and I want to add some of my own to show how the policies are impacting on people. I will make one point before I do so. We need to deal with the housing crisis and it needs to get sorted for the ordinary people who are being shoved left, right and centre. There is no emergency accommodation in Galway city or county. People are told to try to self-finance alternative accommodation because there is no emergency accommodation. I want the policies the Minister is bringing forward to work for people because I cannot continue to have people crying every single Monday in my clinic in Bohermore. People are crying because they are facing homelessness and they do not know what to do, especially when they are being told there is no emergency accommodation.
Nothing was more frustrating than when I saw the proposals last weekend. The Minister must know himself that the reality of his new proposals is that they will increase rent prices. He has to know that the impact of the cut to the tenant in situ scheme means it will shove more people into homelessness. The reality is there has been a real cut for the councils. There are two councils in my constituency, but if the Minister spoke to any of the councils throughout the country, he would definitely know this. He is aware of it and there is no way he does not know it.
I ask the Minister to reconsider these measures. Will he reconsider the cut to the tenant in situ scheme funding? Will he reconsider the proposal he has, which will simply jack up rents? The measures are not working for people. It is not fair to people and people are really struggling.
Donnchadh Ó Laoghaire (Cork South-Central, Sinn Fein)
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One of the things that people cannot get their heads around regarding the housing crisis is how an issue can be top of the political agenda for so long but everything is still going in the wrong direction. How can it be the case that Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have been in government for so long and the crisis has escalated and escalated? We are here discussing a set of emergency measures that are needed. "Emergency" is a word and words matter. They represent a situation. What is fundamental is that neither this Government nor the previous Government have treated the housing crisis as an emergency. They have treated other policy areas as emergencies. We know the capacity exists to respond to issues in an emergency manner but the housing crisis has never been treated as an emergency. In fact, the vast majority of measures the Government took that we welcomed were ones it had to be coaxed, cajoled and dragged into, and then it ended up resiling from them in any event.
Look at the tenant in situ scheme. I know the Minister will respond that the tenant in situ scheme is not closed off and so on. We hear Government Ministers saying they are only targets but this is a classic example of where councils meet targets and are left hanging. This Chamber could have been filled with people from Cork city alone who were prevented from becoming homeless by the tenant in situ scheme, but because the Government is not funding it properly, people have ended up homeless. I know and have met people in my clinic whose homes were sale agreed with the Cork City Council until the Government pulled the rug from under it. More importantly, the Government pulled the rug from under those people who could now be in a council tenancy. Instead, they are in emergency accommodation. That is the reality of it; the Government's policy is doubling down on the bits that do not work and is casting aside protections. The Government has thrown fuel on the fire and now it is ripping out the fireguard. That is the reality of the situation - record rents, record homelessness and record house prices. It is all going in the wrong direction.
8:20 am
James Browne (Wexford, Fianna Fail)
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I move amendment No. 1:
To delete all words after "Dáil Éireann" and substitute the following: "recognises that:— Housing for All, sets out an ambitious multi-annual programme that seeks to deliver more than 300,000 new homes by 2030;further recognises that:
— record levels of investment are being provided for the delivery of housing in 2025, with overall capital funding now available of almost €6.8 billion;
— this provision includes €450 million to support the delivery of 3,000 additional social, affordable and cost rental homes in the period 2025 – 2027; and €265 million to allow for a significant programme of acquisitions in 2025 for priority categories of need;
— the capital provision for 2025 is supplemented by a further €1.65 billion in current funding to address housing needs;
— over 36,700 social homes have been delivered under Housing for All to Quarter 4 2024; in 2023, nearly 12,000 social homes were delivered, including 8,110 new-build social homes, the highest level of delivery of new-build social housing since 1975, and in 2024, 10,595 social homes were delivered including 7,871 new builds, 1,501 acquisitions and 1,223 leasing units;
— nearly 13,000 affordable housing supports have been delivered since the launch of Housing for All to December 2024 by Approved Housing Bodies (AHB), local authorities and the Land Development Agency (LDA), alongside schemes such as the First Home Scheme (FHS) and the Vacant Property Refurbishment Grant;
— over 7,100 affordable housing supports were delivered in 2024, the highest yearly delivery to date, exceeding the year's target of 6,400;
— over €1.3 billion has been approved under the Cost Rental Equity Loan (CREL) since launch, to assist in the delivery of over 6,000 Cost Rental homes across 17 local authority areas, with over 2,000 homes delivered under CREL to end 2024; and
— on 13th May, Government approved an additional €30 million commitment to the FHS, bringing the total State commitment for the FHS to €370 million, more than 6,700 buyers have been approved to date under the FHS and more than 3,300 homes have been bought using the FHS to the end of Quarter 1 2025;— while housing supply has increased significantly in recent years, much more needs to be achieved;acknowledges that:
— the measures introduced under Housing for All have helped establish a solid platform to 'scale-up' delivery of housing in the short-term and secure a sustainable level of supply that will help us meet demand;
— the measures committed to in the Programme for Government, including a new housing plan building on the successes of Housing for All, will help us meet the enormous challenge of delivering more than 300,000 new homes by 2030;
— the Government's new national housing plan will incorporate pragmatic actions to boost housing activity in the short-term coupled with strategic deliverables to drive comprehensive systemic change and subsequent increase in supply into the long-term;
— there has been record levels of investment in infrastructure under the current National Development Plan (NDP) for the period 2021 to 2030;
— new capital investments in infrastructure, particularly to support housing targets, are being considered in the context of the ongoing review of the NDP; and
— on 30th April, 2025, Dáil Éireann approved the Revised National Planning Framework (RNPF), which provides the basis for the review and updating of Regional Spatial and Economic Strategies and local authority development plans to reflect critical matters such as updated housing figures or projected jobs growth, including through the zoning of land for residential, employment and a range of other purposes;— to see the revised NPF translated to a local basis as urgently as possible, local authorities have been advised to start the process of reviewing and updating their development plans to align with the revised NPF;further affirms Government efforts to:
— the Planning and Development Act 2024, which is being commenced on a phased basis over the next 18 months, represents a radical reform of the planning system and will set, for example, new statutory timelines for decision-making and streamline judicial review processes, which will help to reduce the delays that may be constraining housing supply;
— the Planning and Development (Amendment) Bill 2025, to be enacted before this summer recess, will ensure sufficient time is given to activate planning permissions for much needed housing;
— under the Planning and Development Act 2024, the new Urban Development Zones (UDZ) will enable further housing development and the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage has signed an order that will enable local authorities to identify suitable sites for UDZs, and for the LDA and Regional Assemblies to bring appropriate sites to the attention of local authorities and the Minister, with work to begin as soon as possible;
— a review of the Exempted Development provisions is underway that will provide further options for the provision of housing, with a public consultation commenced this month and updated regulations to come into force later this year;
— Part 17 of the Planning and Development Act 2024 will also be commenced shortly to enable the establishment of An Coimisiún Pleanála to replace An Bord Pleanála; and
— a series of reforms have been progressed to support a well-resourced planning system, including the implementation of the Ministerial Action Plan on Planning Resources, which will strengthen the planning system and support the timely delivery of critical infrastructure and housing;
further acknowledges that:
— Government continues to support local authorities in the delivery of housing programmes, with almost €4.8 billion provided to the authorities in 2024 and this will increase further in 2025;
— more than 250 additional capital posts in local authorities nationally are being funded by the Department to support social housing delivery; in addition, over 140 professional/technical and administrative posts dedicated to delivering affordable housing are being funded by the Department in local authorities to strengthen their capacity to initiate, design, plan, develop and manage housing projects;
— the Government is progressing a number of structured and coordinated initiatives to address vacancy and dereliction, including the review of the Derelict Sites Act 1990, the Town Centre First Policy Approach and the implementation of the Planning and Development Act 2024 and development of related secondary legislation, including the current review of exempted development provisions;
— the Planning and Development Regulations provide for an exemption from the need to obtain planning permission for the change of use of certain vacant commercial buildings, including vacant above ground floor premises, to residential use such as 'above shop' living for up to nine units, subject to conditions and limitations, the most recent figures show that since 2018, local authorities have received 1,457 notifications relating to the provision of 3,429 new homes nationwide through use of this specific exemption;
— a €150 million fund to end long-term vacancy and dereliction in towns and cities has been provided under the Urban Regeneration Development Fund (URDF);
— by the end of Quarter 1 2025, over 8,652 Vacant Property Refurbishment Grant approvals had issued already, and €112 million has been paid out to refurbish almost 2,100 homes;
— the Compulsory Purchase Order Activation Programme, launched in April 2023, requires a proactive and systematic approach by local authorities to bring vacant and derelict properties back into use, this includes the active use of compulsory purchase powers by local authorities, with URDF Call 3 and other funding supports available for such purchases; and
— the vacancy rate of 3.5 per cent as reported by the Quarter 4 2024 Geo-Directory report is the lowest recorded vacancy rate since 2013;
affirms Government efforts to:
— support the housing needs of specific groups through a range of measures and supports, including a targeted second-hand social housing acquisitions programme, which responds to the needs of the most vulnerable, and which is supported by increasing the 2025 budget for the programme from the €60 million available under Housing for All to €325 million;
— address the housing options available for older people, as committed to in the Programme for Government, including by mandating local authorities to find suitable sites for housing specifically designed for older adults, ensuring accessible options within local communities; supporting AHBs in developing and managing senior housing with on-site support services; and reviewing and standardising the older persons housing financial contribution scheme;
— support older people and those with disabilities to continue living independently - Budget 2025 provided an Exchequer capital provision of €99.5 million for the Housing Adaptation Grants for Older People and Disabled People with every local authority receiving an increase in their capital allocation; on 9th June, €23 million funding was announced for local authorities to carry out adaptations, extensions and other improvements to their existing social housing stock;
— fund Traveller-specific accommodation which has been fully drawn-down by local authorities over the past five years from 2020 to 2024, resulting in investment of over €100 million capital investment in Traveller-specific accommodation;
— support Housing First which was expanded significantly under Housing for All; over 860 tenancies were created under the current plan up to the end of Quarter 1 2025 and 1,060 individuals were in a Housing First tenancy; and
— increase the availability of suitable, financially accessible student accommodation as a key policy priority in the new Student Accommodation Strategy, being developed by the Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science, which places affordability and equity at its core;— work with all stakeholders to continue accelerating housing supply across all tenures and to deliver social, affordable and cost rental homes at scale and improve the availability and affordability of homes;notes that:
— support individuals and families who may be struggling to purchase a home, through a range of schemes, including the Help to Buy, FHS, Local Authority Affordable Purchase Scheme and the Local Authority Home Loan;
— sustain tenant in-situ acquisitions into 2025 as a clear indication of Government's commitment to preventing homelessness for Housing Assistance Payment and Rental Accommodation Scheme tenants who have been served a 'no fault' Notice of Termination;
— support the rental sector through new policy measures approved by Government on 10th June that will modify rent controls with the aim of strengthening tenancy protections and security of tenure, while encouraging greater private investment in the rental market;
— provide stronger protections and greater certainty for the rental sector by extending rent controls nationally, to protect all tenants from high rent increases, rent increases will be linked to inflation, whilst retaining the cap on permissible rent inflation at two per cent with limited exceptions; and
— to provide greater security of tenure by introducing legislative changes to significantly restrict 'no fault evictions' for smaller landlords (three or fewer tenancies) and to prohibit them for larger landlords, these changes will further enhance the current provision of tenancies of unlimited duration with the introduction of rolling tenancies of a minimum duration of six years with smaller landlords; and— a Housing Activation Office in the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage is being established to identify and seek to address barriers to the delivery of public infrastructure projects needed to enable housing development at local level, through the alignment of funding and coordination of infrastructure providers;
— an Infrastructure Division has been established in the Department of Public Expenditure, Infrastructure, Public Service Reform and Digitalisation, that will lead a process of infrastructure reform; and
— the Government is investing record levels of capital funding in critical infrastructure, including in the areas of water and energy, and will continue to do so under the NDP for the period 2025 to 2035, to be finalised by end of July.".
I am thankful for the opportunity to come before the House today to introduce the Government's amendment to the Sinn Féin motion and to outline the progress that has been made to date by the Government and the Housing for All programme. I will set out a few things to begin with to address some of the points that have been made. The first thing I did when I became Minister was to increase the capital spend by €725 million. When I became Minister, the funding that was available for the tenant in situ scheme was €60 million. I increased it to €325 million. Sinn Féin's own policy on the tenant in situ scheme is to slash it to 800 units per year over the coming years, a fact its Members conveniently keep leaving out. Listening to their speeches, all of them are very good at observing, criticising and personalising politics with lots of clichés, but we heard no solutions-----
Thomas Gould (Cork North-Central, Sinn Fein)
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We gave the Minister a solution last week and he counted it out.
James Browne (Wexford, Fianna Fail)
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Why is that? Why have-----
Thomas Gould (Cork North-Central, Sinn Fein)
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We gave him one last week, Ceann Comhairle.
Verona Murphy (Wexford, Independent)
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Deputy, the Minister did not interrupt you.
James Browne (Wexford, Fianna Fail)
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----- we heard no solutions? Sinn Féin had a manifesto in the general election that was rejected by the people-----
Thomas Gould (Cork North-Central, Sinn Fein)
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It was the truth though.
James Browne (Wexford, Fianna Fail)
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----- that is why I have not heard any more about it since then. Deputy Gould will not shout me down. I ask him to show a little bit of respect, please.
That is what we have heard. We have heard clichés, personalisation, observations and criticisms, but no solutions. That is what one has to come up with - solutions. The only solution is to increase supply, not freezing the housing situation as it is, but increasing supply. That is what all of our proposals are working towards doing.
We also heard about social housing. We are delivering the largest social housing build since the 1970s. That is a fact. We will deliver even more. We have increased the number of houses-----
James Browne (Wexford, Fianna Fail)
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We have significantly increased the delivery of housing in this country, and will take the-----
James Browne (Wexford, Fianna Fail)
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-----next step change to do it.
James Browne (Wexford, Fianna Fail)
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I want to set out some of these achievements that have been to date, but very much recognise that we are in a housing crisis. I am treating it as an emergency. I am taking rapid decisions to address the housing crisis in this country in order that people can get the homes they need where they need them. We will make bold decisions because that is what we have to do to get out of the challenging crisis we are in.
Despite the upward trajectory in supply under Housing for All, the number of new homes build last year was disappointing. Overall, we delivered more ahead of our targets under Housing for All. We will achieve that step change. It is important to reflect on the progress we have made in recent years under Housing for All. After all, in 2012 and 2013, fewer than 5,000 new homes were built in this country each year. By 2022, an undeniable step change in delivery was achieved, with almost 30,000 homes, and more than 32,500 homes delivered in 2022 and 2023, respectively, exceeding the targets in Housing for All. More than 92,000 new homes were built from 2022 to 2024, an annual average of almost 31,000 new homes over the past three years. Nearly 48,000 social homes have been delivered since July 2020. There is also a very strong pipeline, with more than 24,000 social homes at all stages of design and build, which will be delivered over the coming years.
Housing for All also provided for the introduction for the first time of a number of new affordable housing supports, enabling the delivery of a significant number of affordable homes through both new builds and homes brought back into use. Nearly 13,000 affordable home supports have been delivered since the launch of Housing for All to December 2024 by AHBs, local authorities and the Land Development Agency alongside schemes such as the first home scheme and the vacant property refurbishment grant. More than 7,100 affordable supports were delivered in 2024, the highest yearly figure to date, exceeding the year's target of 6,400.
On 13 May, the Government approved an additional €30 million State commitment to the first home scheme, bringing the total State commitment to the scheme to €370 million. Under this scheme, more than 6,700 buyers have been approved to date. More than 3,300 homes have been bought using this scheme to the end of quarter 1 of 2025.
The Opposition motion calls for a dramatic increase of investment in and delivery of public housing to meet social and affordable housing need. The Government and the previous Government, under Housing for All, have rolled out the largest social and affordable housing programme in the history of the State. We will continue to do so. This is demonstrated by the record level of investment provided for the delivery of housing in 2025, with overall capital funding now available of almost €6.8 billion. The capital provision for 2025 is supplemented by a further €1.65 billion in current funding to address the housing need.
Despite the undoubted progress, we must acknowledge that housing still remains a crisis. The number of new homes coming on stream each year is far short of what we need. The State has invested unprecedented levels of public money in the delivery of housing in recent years, and we must continue to do so. We must consider every available lever at our disposal. In the programme for Government, the Government has committed to delivering 300,000 new homes between 2025 and 2030, targeting at least 60,000 homes annually by the end of that period. New targets are ambitious, but they provide a credible pathway to delivering the scale of housing needed. Our immediate focus, however, must be on activating. Key to achieving targets will be the delivery of new apartment developments in our cities and urban cores, and much of the investment needed for such developments must come from the private sector, financed through appropriate sources of capital funding, much of which will come from international sources. Again, the Opposition will not say where this funding will come from. It is quick to criticise but has no solutions. The capital is critical to apartment delivery, particularly for the private rental sector. Many of the apartments delivered last year were State-led. While this has secured much needed social, cost-rental and affordable housing, it is not sustainable in the long term to get from 30,000 to 50,000 or 60,000 homes. The State delivered 50% of all homes in this country last year-----
James Browne (Wexford, Fianna Fail)
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We will deliver more social and affordable homes. To get the numbers up to 50,000 or 60,000, however, we have to get the private sector to deliver. The State simply does not have that level of funding.
The changes approved by Government last week regarding new policy measures to support the rental sector by strengthening tenancy protections and security of tenure will provide significantly stronger protection for tenants and are finely balanced between the interests of tenants and the need for further investment in the rental market. Ultimately, we aim to improve the situation for renters by increasing the supply of rental and private accommodation, social accommodation and affordable accommodation. The measures providing greater certainty of protection from no-fault evictions will also be a critical intervention in preventing homelessness.
Addressing homelessness is a top priority for this Government. Funding of €303 million will be available for the delivery of homeless services in 2025. This will ensure that local authorities can provide emergency accommodation, homeless prevention and tenancy sustainment services, including housing first and other services to households experiencing or at risk of homelessness. It will also ensure that these households in emergency accommodation are supported to exit homelessness as quickly as possible.
Expanded significantly under Housing for All, the housing first programme provides the most vulnerable of our homeless population with a home for life, as well as key wrap-around health services and social supports to help them. The housing first national implementation plan aims to create 1,319 tenancies by the end of 2026. The programme for Government increased this target to create a total of 2,000 tenancies by 2030. More than 860 tenancies were created under the current plan up to the end of quarter 1 of 2025. A total of 1,060 individuals were in a housing first tenancy.
Tenant in situ acquisitions are recognised as a key measure in the prevention of homelessness. As such, I reassert the Government's commitment to the continuation-----
Thomas Gould (Cork North-Central, Sinn Fein)
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That is not true.
James Browne (Wexford, Fianna Fail)
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----- of a more focused and targeted programme-----
Thomas Gould (Cork North-Central, Sinn Fein)
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That is not true. He cannot come into this House and make statements that are not true.
Verona Murphy (Wexford, Independent)
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Equally, you cannot-----
James Browne (Wexford, Fianna Fail)
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----- to ensure it benefits those who need it the most.
Thomas Gould (Cork North-Central, Sinn Fein)
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He is a Minister. A Government Minister.
Verona Murphy (Wexford, Independent)
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There is a protocol here.
James Browne (Wexford, Fianna Fail)
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The Government has supported, and will continue to support, a targeted second-hand social housing acquisition programme, which responds to the needs of the most vulnerable. The Government increased the 2025 budget for second-hand social housing acquisition programme from the €60 million available under Housing for All to €325 million.
This has given local authorities the flexibility within their programmes to respond to needs locally.
The clear focus of Government is to increase the supply of new-build social and affordable homes. Increasing the overall housing supply is key to addressing the housing challenge, particularly in preventing and ultimately eliminating long-term homelessness.
The Government is also committed to supporting the needs of specific groups through a range of measures and supports to improve the delivery and standard of housing for Travellers, disabled people and older people in conjunction with key stakeholders, particularly local authorities and the affordable housing sector. Traveller-specific accommodation funding has been fully drawn down by local authorities in recent years, from 2020 to 2024, resulting in more than €100 million in capital investment in Traveller-specific accommodation. My Department also offers grants, such as the housing aid for older people and grants which help older people with necessary repairs and improvements. We are also addressing the critical infrastructure challenges being faced as a result of the massive and rapidly increasing population in this country.
These are just some of the measures introduced by this Government and the previous Government under Housing for All. We will continue to work hard to deliver the housing needed in this country.
8:30 am
Réada Cronin (Kildare North, Sinn Fein)
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For years, we have known about the state of the housing crisis and calling it an emergency. The President, Uachtarán na hÉireann, called it disastrous when he came to my constituency in north Kildare. Record level house prices, rising rents and missing its own building targets year after year is the Government's record on housing as well as misleading people in the last general election with made up figures.
In my constituency of north Kildare, a second-hand three-bedroom house is currently €500,000. How is any nurse, teacher, bus driver or retail worker expected to afford that? The Government is locking ordinary working people out of housing and it has been going that way for too long. Those who are locked out of housing face the desperate conditions of the homeless services. I know of many who will not go to the homeless services because the conditions are so horrendous in some of those shelters. There is no dignity there.
I had a retired teacher in my office a couple of weeks ago who was crying because she had just become homeless. She is sleeping in her car because she refuses to go to the hostels offered by Kildare County Council. There is no dignity for people and the Government does not seem to care about them. She feels she has no other option than to sleep in her car as it is a better alternative to what the State provides to its most vulnerable.
This is not the only reason people are sleeping in their cars. A few months ago, people were sleeping in their cars to try to see a house, a new build in Leixlip. This has only gotten worse under the Government's watch. As far it is concerned, rents and house prices are not high enough. We need real action immediately to protect renters by freezing and cutting rent in the reintroduction of no-fault evictions. We need a united front like the one we had outside Leinster House today to stand up to this Government, fight back, demand the dignity our citizens deserve and demand change immediately.
Denise Mitchell (Dublin Bay North, Sinn Fein)
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We did not just wake up in this housing crisis; it has been going on for decades. We have seen plan after plan. Does the Minister remember rebuilding Ireland? That failed. Now we have Housing for All. In the meantime, and while this plan is going on, we have longer housing lists, people waiting to be housed, more unaffordable housing and record homelessness. Like many people outside the gate tonight, I am sick and tired of listening to the Government blame everybody else; it is always everybody else's fault. The Government is in charge in this State and has continued to underfund local authority housing departments which then cannot deliver housing. The Government decided in recent months to delay funds and restrict access to the tenant in situ scheme, throwing renters under the bus. That is before we come to its new announcement on rents, which is all over the shop. We all know this will do one thing: make rents go up.
This is not about opposition for the sake of opposition. For our part, we publish policy after policy of what we believe would solve this crisis. The Government does not agree with us and that is fine. It will have to stand over the decisions it makes. The one thing I will say - and it pains me listening to it from the Government - is that nobody expects this crisis to be fixed overnight but this has been going on year after year and we must call it out. It is a direct result of the Minister's Government's poor policy, reliance on private developers and now its inability to react. People need to stand up and call a stop.
Martin Kenny (Sligo-Leitrim, Sinn Fein)
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I listened intensely to the Minister's speech and one of the things that always strikes me is the Government seems to believe what it is doing is working. Do those in government not talk to their constituents and meet people, including the families who have elderly people living in their accommodation with them because they were put out of the places they were renting? Have they not spoken to people with youngsters who have come back to live with them who, having lived abroad for years, have come back here to try to get a house but can get nowhere? We all meet those people and know the situation is not working.
The Minister says it is crisis and the Government is treating it as such. If it was treating this like a crisis, the Government would be doing much more to resolve the issue. A big part of Irish society, which is totally left out of this, are the ordinary working people. They are the people who go to college, get a good job and think they are going to get on in life but discover they cannot afford, or do not have a hope of affording, a house or place to live. We all meet them every day of the week. They are the ones telling us the Government is failing. They are the ones this State is supposed to protect and look after. They get up every day, go to work and pay their taxes, yet they cannot find a house. If they do find one, they cannot afford it.
The Minister talked about needing big investors to come in and about all these apartments that will be built. Who will live in these apartments? It will be people who are earning €120,000 or €140,000 a year because that is the only sector they will cater for. They will cater for people who are on very high salaries. People who are ordinary workers and earn decent money but will still not meet that will be left behind. They will not be on the social housing list and will have nowhere else to go. The only thing they can do is to look to Australia, Canada or somewhere to emigrate to. That is unfortunately what I see.
I have youngsters in my own house who are in their 20s and that is what all their friends talk about doing. They talk about going somewhere else for the very reason that they do not see the prospect of being able to get a job in this country that will put them in a position where they can buy a house in the future. They talk about going away somewhere else, hoping to make enough money to come back with a deposit and to be able to buy a place. That is the way things are going; I have seen it. I recently spoke to an auctioneer who told me about new houses coming on the market in my area and that were going to be up to €400,000. There is not a hope for ordinary people to buy them and the Government just wants to leave them behind. The Government is a total and absolute failure as far as this policy on housing is concerned.
Seán Crowe (Dublin South West, Sinn Fein)
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House prices, rents, council waiting lists and homelessness are all rising. Any options for ordinary workers and their families are vanishing. Figures from the start of this month show there were almost 16,000 people in emergency accommodation. This Government cannot even be said to be making a dent in the figures. At the start of this year, there were fewer than 14,000 relying on emergency accommodation. At the start of last year, it was fewer than 12,000 and the year before that it was 9,000. None of these figures include rough sleepers, women and children in domestic violence refuges, those who are couch surfing or crammed into their own box room with young children or those who are sleeping in cars.
Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil excel in one thing and that is smashing the homeless record month after month. They have normalised homelessness. The Government has absolutely no handle on the situation at all. It is a runaway carriage and will continue to be so until the Government finally accepts it is a housing policy, the entire ideology of which has failed. It cannot even provide the water or electricity infrastructure needed to allow housing to be built. Urgent and real action must be taken to address the ever-deepening housing and homelessness crisis.
The Government must introduce the ban on no-fault evictions. This policy saw the first reduction in homelessness numbers in over a decade when it was introduced during Covid. The Minister stands up here and tells us his plans are working and that he cannot build homes overnight. The previous Minister managed to wheel it out during the last election with a straight face. We have been hearing it from Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil for more than a decade that it cannot be built overnight but when can they and when will they be built?
Paul Donnelly (Dublin West, Sinn Fein)
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I will read out two examples of emails that come into my constituency office:
It is with a heavy heart I am asking you to find yourself another house to rent. Unfortunately, you cannot wait any longer as this application has been going on since last autumn with a tenant in situ and the eviction notice on the property was up in April and the house prices are increasing every day. We are going to have to act on the eviction notice as we are still none the wiser as to when this is going to happen.
This is from another constituent:
I write to you in a desperate situation seeking your assistance in the following matter. We have three children. The landlord informs us he intends to sell the property to us or on the private market with us as tenants in situ. We are waiting on Fingal County Council as an application has been made. It has been inspected, evaluated, specific circumstances assessed, however, the process has stalled this year, through a lack of funding. The landlord informed us yesterday [by email] that we need to move out of the property.
That is two of the thousands of people who are facing eviction. The cornerstone of the Government programme and its plan is that rents are going to increase. Then, developers and vulture funds will move in and build apartments. The flaw in this thinking is, does the Government honestly expect them to build enough and continue to build to see rents fall? Does the Government honestly believe that the vulture funds and the capitalists that are building these apartments and who are going to get, because of the Government, €2,500, €3,000, €4,000 and if you live in Howth, €5,000 per month, they are going to continue to build and build and see those rents fall, because there will be a surplus in the market? No, they will stop because they will want to keep rents high. It is a disgraceful action being taken by the Government.
8:40 am
Conor Sheehan (Limerick City, Labour)
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The response of the Government to tonight's cross-party motion is extremely disappointing. The Labour Party has produced volumes of legislation on housing in the last couple of years, including, but not limited to the Housing (Homeless Families) Bill 2017, the renters' rights Bill and a Bill to give effect to the recommendations of the Kenny report to cap the cost of development land. Einstein's definition of madness is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. The fact of the matter is that with the changes to the tenant in situ scheme, the Government has effectively gutted the scheme. The changes being proposed regarding RPZs will not stop rents going up. Under Housing for All, the Government has never met its targets for social and affordable housing. The Government has come in here and effectively thrown renters under the bus by completely undermining housing options for young people, students, junior doctors and for transient and migrant workers. This will not stop with rents rising, because we all know that these people stay in their accommodation for a fixed amount of time and when they move on the rent will be reset and it will rise and rise again. Recently the Minister said that rents in Ireland are way to high. I agree with him. However, here he has introduced measures which will only cause rents to rise higher and higher and effectively bake in upward-only rent increases.
These RPZ changes will not guarantee any increase in supply in the private rental market, certainly not in my own city of Limerick. It may result in an increase in build-to-rent accommodation in Dublin and maybe in Cork, but it certainly will not be affordable. Rents in Limerick rose by 20% last year. The measures proposed in this motion are common sense, evidence based and implementable. They are emergency measures in response to a crisis which has led to 15,000 people becoming homeless. This is the equivalent of the population of a town the size of Tullamore. An entire generation of young people are locked out of any hope of owning a home of their own and are trapped in their parents' box bedroom, if they are lucky enough. I am one of that generation and it is my generation that is paying the price for this. This is the same generation that still disproportionately bears the scars of the financial crash. Ours is the first generation that will do worse than our parents. This is a crisis caused primarily by poor political and policy decisions, made at the behest of institutional investors and vulture funds which have essentially screwed young people.
For ten years the previous Government and this one have prioritised the needs of big business over ordinary people and this is the result. We only have to look at the group most affected by the latest changes, students. Under these proposed changes, students, as I said, will leave their accommodation as they invariably do every year and they will see their rent rocket every time the tenancy changes. They have no protection under these measures. This begs the question for me as to what the Government has against young people. It feels like ideological warfare against the youth of Ireland. As a result of this Government's and previous ones' policies, young people are denied the traditional rites of passage that come with adulthood; leaving home, renting, buying a property, even starting a family. I have friends who want to have children but cannot because they are living at home with their parents and they cannot bring more people into an already overcrowded home.
The concept of living a normal, independent life has literally become a fairy tale for many people in their 20s and 30s. I feel that whenever I or anyone else calls this out here, we are met with pure and utter condescension. Home ownership is already out of reach for people of my age. Now, with these proposed changes, renting will be out of reach, yet again. We are losing thousands of young people every year to London, Sidney, Dubai, Perth and other places all over the world. Some of this is undoubtedly due to the normal rites of passage that come with adulthood, but the problem is that once people go, they are more than likely not going to come back, due to this housing crisis. It is always young people and it is always renters. If it is not young people and renters, it is Travellers and people from migrant backgrounds who are worst affected by this crisis. I want to be really clear that this housing crisis is not being caused by immigrants or immigration. It is a failure of policy and a failure of Government.
In the time remaining to me, I want to talk about a woman who emailed my office recently. She said she gave up her own secure HAP tenancy in order to return home to care for her late mother, during her terminal illness. She said that like anyone would do, she dropped everything to care for her mam and to become her full-time carer. She was fully transparent with the council throughout this time. It was her understanding that the process to add her to the rent account was under way. However, her mother subsequently died. Despite the woman grieving the loss of her mother, the council refused her right to succeed the tenancy under the two-year rule. She has now been threatened with legal notices, demanding she leave the home and threatening court action if she does not surrender the keys. This is despite the fact that this is the home she grew up in for many years. She is the mother of three young children, including twin boys, who are only one year old. She has continued to pay the rent and look after the property since her mother died. While she is actively trying to secure alternative accommodation, it has become impossible. The only option given to her by the local authority is to present herself as homeless to get emergency accommodation. She says she is on the housing list but a suitable property is nowhere in sight.
From what has transpired during the past week, it is very clear the Government is at sixes and sevens. At this stage we have had four contradictory and confusing announcements. The Government does not know what it is doing and by any objective measure, it is failing to prevent people entering homelessness and failing to build an adequate supply of social and affordable housing. The Housing Commission has recommended that this should amount to 20% of all housing stock. Currently, it amounts to 10% and this is failing young people of my age, in particular.
In this motion, we have presented a number of practical solutions. If the Government engaged meaningfully and took on board some of them, they would make a practical difference. I urge the Government to withdraw its amendment to the motion and to engage constructively with all of us. We have put our political differences aside to come together and we ask the Government to join us in taking collective action.
Rory Hearne (Dublin North-West, Social Democrats)
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The motion is a very important one. It is putting forward solutions. We have heard criticism directly from the Taoiseach regarding the lack of solutions, but they are there, we have put them forward and we are putting them forward again tonight.
The Opposition parties are bringing this motion to highlight that this housing crisis is no longer just a crisis. In fact, it has not been a crisis for many years, it is and has been an emergency. It is, in fact, beyond an emergency, it is a social catastrophe. When we look at what has happened in terms of the housing crisis and this record - we can talk about a new Government, but this is a continuation of the previous Government, which has within it Members who have been in power since 2011 - we see that it is now causing a social catastrophe in particular in the area of mental health. We look at the despair and anxiety among half a million adults stuck in their childhood bedrooms, who are unable to start an independent life, get a home of their own, start a family or see a point at which they can actually begin their lives. I have spoken to many of them and they talk about how difficult it is to see hope. Many of them have emigrated or are emigrating. They are the nurses, doctors and tradespeople that we need in this country.
If we go to renters, a million renters in this country are now facing even higher rents in the coming years, rents that will be increased across the board to market rents that are absolutely unaffordable. Then we can look at those who are in homelessness or in hidden homelessness - the people who are not counted - the couch surfers, those sleeping in cars and those in domestic violence refuges who are not counted in our homeless figures. All of them are experiencing some level of anxiety and ongoing stress. That is why this housing crisis should not be called just a crisis: as I said, it is a social catastrophe.
We need to be clear that having a home of your own that is safe, secure and affordable is the most basic of human needs. It is, in fact, a human right. Although this Government does not view it that way and has yet to legislate in policy or in law to make housing a human right, housing is a human right, one of the most basic rights that people have. Everyone in this country has a right to a safe, secure and affordable home.
The housing catastrophe is no accident of policy, it results from decades of policies. We could go back 40 years to see the roots of the housing crisis. It goes back to the years of the Celtic tiger when local authorities were effectively decommissioned from delivering social housing. We heard from a former county manager at the housing committee last week who spoke about this. He was the manager of Fingal County Council and he talked about when councils had the capacity, when they were delivering thousands of homes directly every year. What happened was Fianna Fáil-led governments said local authorities were no longer needed and they turned to Part V and the developers to deliver social housing. They decommissioned local authorities and then Fine Gael, during the years from 2011 onwards, effectively gutted local authorities of their ability and capacity to deliver housing. We talk about an emergency and the Government talks about the housing crisis, but it created it. There is no acknowledgment of the fact that this crisis was created by decades of policy failures and bad policy decisions that effectively decommissioned the role of local authorities in delivering housing. We must recover that and get back to the point at which local authorities can deliver thousands of homes each year.
The other key policy that has brought us here is the treatment of housing as a financial asset, as a real estate asset class that is about investor funds and corporate landlords profiting from housing. That is why the Minister is removing the rent cap between new tenancies. His policy makes it very clear: he is allowing rents to rise in order to incentivise a supply of new housing. He is going to remove the inter-tenancy cap and rents will be brought up to market rents. He is going to introduce a policy whereby new-build units will be tied to inflation. What that means is that if inflation rises to 4%, 5% or 20%, rents will rise on that basis. What we are going to see is incredible. The Minister admitted to it today: he cannot protect nurses, doctors, students, guards - anyone needing short-term leases - from rent increases. Is this not absolutely unacceptable? How is he justifying allowing rents to rise to market rents when we are in the middle of a housing emergency?
The Minister talks about barriers and blockages to housing. I have made the point publicly, and I will say it again: right now, the Minister for housing and this Government are one of the blockages, if not the major blockage and barrier to housing.
8:50 am
Rory Hearne (Dublin North-West, Social Democrats)
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I have been extremely critical. The Minister has withdrawn funding from public-private partnership developments.
Rory Hearne (Dublin North-West, Social Democrats)
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We need funding for those schemes to deliver housing.
Pádraig Rice (Cork South-Central, Social Democrats)
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I have just come in from the protest outside the gates of the House. There is a huge crowd of people outside protesting about the Government's failed policies. We have nurses, students, young people, renters and representatives from all the political parties. They have one really clear message: it is that the Government's housing policies are failing. Things are getting worse and not better, yet the Government is doubling down.
What we hear constantly from the Government is that we have turned a corner. Honestly, it has turned so many corners now, it is going round in circles. The Minister has fundamentally got the new rent rules wrong. Students, who are going to change tendencies every year, are going to have their rents reset to market levels. Every single year, students are going to face record high rents. There will be increases year after year. A student attending college for four years in Cork who moves their tenancy every year will get a huge jump in their rent. I do not think the Minister has thought this through. I do not think he has thought through that students, young people and people who move for work will get their rent reset every single year.
The Minister needs to rebrand his affordable housing schemes because they are not affordable. There are affordable houses in Cork city costing €400,000. Does the Minister genuinely believe that a home costing €400,000 is an affordable home? I would love an answer to the question of what he actually considers to be affordable for someone in this country, because in my view €400,000 is not an affordable home. It is an expensive home, not one that people can afford.
When it comes to social housing, we have not seen the increases we need. In 2023, there was an increase of only 180 social homes in Cork city. Meanwhile, over 3,500 wait on the waiting list. As a result, we have people waiting for more than ten years to access social housing in Cork city. It is not good enough and it needs to change.
At the same time, we have 350 vacant council houses - houses that are boarded up - where the council spent almost €1 million in five years boarding up vacant council houses, while we have hundreds of people in our city who are homeless.
I do not think the Minister is considering the consequences of his policies and the decisions he is making that are driving up rents, house prices and homelessness. It is a social catastrophe. I ask the Minister to stop, to think, to reconsider and to change track. What we need is a new direction and a new approach in housing policy.
I urge people in Cork city and across Munster to come and gather with us in Cork city this Saturday at 2 p.m. for the Raise the Roof rally and to send a signal and a message to the Government that its housing policies have utterly failed and they need to change.
Gary Gannon (Dublin Central, Social Democrats)
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I thank those who brought forward this motion, which is incredibly timely and important. It is one that resonates across society in Ireland. It is especially timely coming on the same day as the Raise the Roof protest, which is taking place outside the building this evening. People are once again calling on the Government to finally treat the housing crisis with the urgency it demands. I had the pleasure of stepping outside and engaging with the crowd. The energy was contagious. It was incredible to see so many people there with such a common purpose.
While there are so many dimensions to this crisis that have been discussed by my party colleagues and others across the Chamber, I want to focus on the widespread dereliction we have allowed to take hold in our towns and cities. In the heart of my constituency of Dublin Central, thousands of properties lie empty or in ruin. It is a staggering waste of existing infrastructure in the midst of a housing emergency, which has already had catastrophic consequences for families, most notably for children growing up in emergency accommodation with all of the impacts on their lives that are documented at this point.
Every day I see boarded up shopfronts, crumbling upper floors braced with steel, properties in prime locations that have been left to rot for decades, not due to fire or natural disasters, but because our current system tolerates, even enables, this decay. When public bodies allow buildings to lie derelict for decades, we are witnessing urban abandonment. Dereliction is far from harmless; it corrodes community life and leaves Dublin and our towns the length and breadth of this country looking unloved, feeling unsafe after dark, and very clearly underutilised.
This motion puts forward decisive actions. We are often asked for ideas from this side of the House and this motion contains any number of them, as have previous motions throughout the years. The motion contains: a dereliction tax and stronger levy enforcement to incentivise reuse and redevelopment, a bold use of compulsory purchase orders wielded swiftly to bring empty properties back into the housing market and a commitment to substantial public investment in social and affordable homes, not more excuses or half-measures.
Families are struggling, essential workers are being forced out and young people are being saddled with emigration. There is no merit in letting buildings crumble while homes are desperately needed. There has been a complete lack of political will or even indifference from successive governments when it comes to housing. A vacant property tax exists but it has no teeth. I understand when I say there is no political will, others might say that is not true. What else do we call it when the results are clearly in front of our eyes? Dereliction should not be tolerated in any community, especially when so many are suffering. To allow it is a dereliction of duty. We call on the Government to agree to a vigorous enforcement of vacancy and dereliction levies, swift deployment of compulsory purchase orders and meaningful State-led investment to convert derelict properties into secure affordable homes. This motion puts forward emergency actions in the hope that finally some form of action will be taken. That is all we ask; that action is taken. I do not care who solves this crisis, I just want it solved. It requires urgency, investment, innovation and a general desire to improve our towns, cities and villages for the people who live there.
9:00 am
Brian Stanley (Laois, Independent)
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This a very important, timely motion. As a group of TDs on the left, we were party to it. The situation is a housing emergency; everybody accepts that now, with 15,500 plus in homeless accommodation and huge waiting lists for social housing. County Laois, which has a fairly good record for social housing, still has a housing waiting list of 1,600 households. Low Government targets and projections are missed by a country mile. There is a huge need for investment in infrastructure and water in which we are falling way behind. Those who are above the income limit for social housing cannot get or buy an affordable house or get a cost-rental. This is really important. This is a group that is being left behind, a group of low-paid workers who are being caught and have no options. They are trapped forever in private rented accommodation with no control over the rent they are charged. What is being provided is drip-feed affordable housing and even fewer cost-rentals. Ministers, that needs to change. Workers and families are paying more than half their income in some cases to rack-renting landlords and we need to change that. What do we get? What did this Government do last week? It will force measures through this House that will drive already skyrocketing prices into the air. The Government shows no regard for struggling renters, or else it seems to miss the point.
New apartments will not be covered by the 2% rent cap that is supposed to bring prices down. Is the Government kidding? A landlord with three or fewer homes can continue to charge what they like and continue with no-fault evictions. When a tenancy ends voluntarily due to a tenant buying a house, moving into a social house or going to another rented home, the landlord can charge what is called “market rent.” This means they can follow the already galloping rents that are there.
What are students to do? They seem to have been forgotten. They are going to return in September. What are they facing come September and the September after that? The prices they are being charged are astronomical. We need to do something for students.
While it is welcome that 55 municipal districts not covered by RPZs are to be brought into the loop, though the Minister forgot about that last week until he was reminded, even with existing RPZs, landlords have found ways around them. We can take any town in the county, for example, Port Laoise or Mountmellick and places like that. In Port Laoise, rents have shot up way beyond 2%, to multiples of that. The proof is in the actual rents being charged. We must bring in proper rent limits and increase the supply of cost-rental and affordable housing. We must also step up the tenant in situ scheme and invest in critical infrastructure such as water supply and electricity to ensure new homes can be brought onstream.
Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent)
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In my three minutes I am going to repeat what I have said since the day I came in here. This crisis has been caused by Government policy. We have just come in from the Raise the Roof protest. There is no doubt each policy from each Government has intensified the crisis as it has failed to recognise - deliberately so - that housing is a basic human right. Each Government has dealt with it like an asset and allowed the market to provide. When it did not provide, governments brought in every possible scheme to support the market, the HAP scheme being absolutely the worst, which became the only game in town. It is really important.
Today I heard an interview with a Mr. O'Driscoll on the new infrastructure taskforce and I was singularly unimpressed with his narrative. I state that publicly. I agree with him we have failed to provide investment in infrastructure but no questions were asked as to how that happened. How did it happen that a city like Galway has no provision for a wastewater treatment plant on its east side, meaning no development can take place? How has it happened there is no wastewater treatment plant to the west, in Conamara? There were no questions asked. We look at planning and we put all the problems down to objectors, which is a dangerous and disingenuous narrative. It is absolutely appalling that arguments by somebody in that position reduces it to “objectors” when the real problem is at any given time there are 500 planning vacancies. I put my hands up and say "tell me if I am wrong." However, how one runs a system like that with so many vacancies is pertinent. We blame the courts for judicial reviews when the only avenue left to many people is to go that route. The Minister knows that very well and the misquoting and misusing of figures.
We also absolutely made local authorities non-existent in relation to the provision of housing. We stopped building housing in Galway in 2009. We never built a single other house until about 2020. An integral part of the solution is public housing on public land. That is one part of the solution. The Government set up various entities and agencies, including the Land Development Agency and we are now going to extend its power. Its remit should be totally public housing on public land which it is not doing. It is doing a deal in Galway on the docks on public land for premium housing. At the risk of boring the Minister, we have a jigsaw of pieces - I am not sure how many pieces, though it might be an exaggeration to say 500 - with no overall vision except to bow down to the market and that the market will provide and when it does not, to add a new piece and a new piece to make sure we keep the prices up. It is an obscenity to talk about affordable housing at the price it is.
Charles Ward (Donegal, 100% Redress Party)
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On behalf of the 100% Redress Party I voice my strong support for the Raise the Roof campaign. We need to call the housing and homelessness crisis what it is; a national emergency. This is a national emergency and requires a national emergency response. This crisis has been going on for over a decade. Over ten years there has been a lack of housing, rising rents, crumbling homes and increased homelessness. House prices have risen by more than 130% in this time and rents have risen by more than 80%. We have seen record-breaking homelessness month after month. What kind of country do we live in when tens of thousands of people living here do not have a place to sleep at night or call their home? It is an absolute disgrace.
More than 4,500 children are living in emergency accommodation right now as we speak. Thousands of children across the country are growing up and spending their early and most formative years in hotel rooms and crowded living areas. Many of these children do not have access to a proper nutritional diet or a proper space to play. How can they be expected to grow and develop in these conditions? How do we hope to give them a fulfilling childhood when they are stuck in hotel rooms from age five to age 13? According to the 2022 census, the largest age group amongst the homeless population was infants to four-year-olds. That is 11.4% of the total homeless population. This is devastating and contradicts what many of us think homelessness looks like and who it impacts. Homelessness has been shown to have a negative effect on children's development, their participation in education and their run in life as they grow older. The number of children impacted is rising every year, along with the number of people experiencing homelessness. Many families have been impacted due to the defective concrete crisis. It is clear from these figures the Government is failing. The only time in the past decade we saw a drop in the monthly homelessness figures was during the Covid lockdown measures. The Government needs to change tack and take action. We need an emergency Covid-level response and intervention in this crisis and we need it now.
9:10 am
Ruth Coppinger (Dublin West, Solidarity)
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I welcome this opportunity, particularly as it is the first time I have taken part in a housing debate in the new Dáil with the Minister present. It is important that we get our points across to him. I was also outside at the protest. I am looking forward to a huge turnout on 5 July for the Community Action Tenants Union protest, particularly because young people are in despair. They are either sleeping in cars in order to stay in college because they cannot get accommodation or they are dropping out of college. Afterwards, they are not able to live independent lives. Student teachers and nurses are heading straight to Australia. The knock-on impact of this throughout society is incredible. One place where it is having such an impact is on the waiting lists relating to children's disability network teams. One in three vacancies for these teams cannot be filled. One thing I will never forgive the Government for is the oxygen it is giving to the far right by refusing to tackle the housing crisis. In the diverse communities I represent, many people are living in fear because of the hate and division being stoked up in places where minorities are being targeted.
I want to focus on solutions because the Government says we do not have them. Making the private rental sector more attractive to investment funds is not the solution. Taking away indefinite tenancies, opening up the prospect of instability after six years, allowing rents relating to new-build apartments to be put up beyond 2% and at the rate of inflation and voluntary exit potentially leading to rent hikes will be a disaster, especially for students. The Minister mentioned solutions. I dug out a report from nine years ago that I wrote after spending a hell of a lot of hours on a special housing committee set up by the Dáil. It was an all-party committee. Hundreds of hours were spent on that committee, and none of the recommendations it put forward was adopted.
Without being boastful, I would say that I have been responsible more houses to be built than the Minister. For example, Church Fields in Mulhuddart, which is being cited by the Minister and everyone as being the greatest thing since sliced bread, was put forward by me and Solidarity councillors in 2017. We got an architect to write a plan. We used a drone to make a video. We brought it to Fingal County Council and said there was a landbank it could develop. We told the council it had the money and outlined how it could work financially, with 50% social housing and 50% affordable housing. That scheme is now Church Fields. Development is under way. Hundreds of people will get homes as a result. It is not exactly the model I wanted, but it is much better than leaving the site vacant as had been the case. We have the same prospect now with another landbank and I want the Minister to take this on board. Fingal County Council has a huge strategic landbank at Scribblestown in Dunsink at which it has reported 7,000 homes could be built. It has asked for €200 million from the Government to help to get started. That must not be a long-term project. It should be a short-term project. There should be houses starting on that in five years. It is near a rail line. It has major potential. It has natural wildlife parklands that could be developed and it could provide homes for thousands of workers and young people.
The Minister asks where the money is. The Government has a budget surplus of €10 billion. It has the Apple money of €14 billion. I urge the Minister to please not use money as an excuse. There is ample money to build public housing, which is the only way to provide it cheaply and in the supply that is needed.
Richard O'Donoghue (Limerick County, Independent Ireland Party)
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We will be sharing time. We will each have three and a half minutes.
There is a housing crisis. We need to deliver houses. I am offering my services to the Minister, as I have offered them to other Ministers, to help to deliver houses. I do so in light of the experience I have and the knowledge I have that Irish Water is not providing value for money. It will not deliver the infrastructure needed to deliver houses. That is a fact. With all the millions and billions it is quoting the Government to deliver infrastructure, it has now been proved that Irish Water has not come in on budget on any of the contracts I have seen.
I will give a small synopsis of what has happened since the local authorities stepped away from water services and Irish Water stepped in. Ballingarry lost water for three days because an alarm went off and no one came back to check it. Pumps ran dry. We lost the water supply because someone did not go back to an alarm system that was being looked after by the local authority, and 1,000 houses were without water. We then had to pay for a new pump and run up the services again. The Croom water supply involved the use of five tankers a day for two and half months, which cost hundreds of thousands of euro because when the project started, no one checked where it would connect to. As a result, it went a few hundred thousand euro over budget and there was a need to use tankers to deliver water to a population of 2,500.
Irish Water is not offering value for money, so why not look at a developer-led approach? Let the developers put in the infrastructure and let Irish Water take it over when it has been built on time and on budget. That will help the Minister. All the budgets that come to the Minister are not factual. I want to help the Minister in any way I can by showing Irish Water up and showing that it is not offering value for money in order to allow him deliver more houses. I do not care if he gets the praise for it. Once the houses are built, I do not care who gets the praise. I want to help. I do not want to help with money being squandered when we could deliver infrastructure.
I also want to see the infrastructure for the water supplies we have been talking about. I spoke here two weeks ago. If we take storm water out of the sewerage system, a lot of the plants that are under pressure will survive until the Minister can get funding to them. It is a simple fix to remove water where we can. All new developments can be separated at no extra cost. If we can deliver that now, we can use existing systems and allow more houses to be built by removing the storm water and letting it run into the waterways by means of an inverted system. That is all we have to do. It is a simple fix. It would help the Government deliver more houses until it gets the chance to upgrade the plants.
During the winter months, we treat 70% water and 30% sewerage. When we have a dry summer, we deal 100% with sewerage and the plants are fine. Again, I am trying to help the Government to deliver. I will throw the ball in and the Minister can pull on it. He can deliver the houses. It is a win-win situation for everyone. The Minister will get value for money because I have no problem with being a watchdog and letting him deliver. This is what I am asking the Minister to do: let me help him by showing him he is not getting value for money. This will allow him to deliver more houses through his Department. That is what I am asking, and I will help him. At any meeting he is attending or any place he is going, let me in for a day to listen to what he is being told. Let me take the projects apart and show him they do not offer value for money. Development-led projects are needed so the Minister can deliver more houses. I am here to help. I will criticise him if I have to for not taking me up on my suggestion. If he wants help, I will give him the help he wants. That is what I am offering.
Michael Collins (Cork South-West, Independent Ireland Party)
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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.
9:20 am
Paul Lawless (Mayo, Aontú)
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I welcome the Minister to this debate on housing. He says he wants to deliver more private homes across the country. I agree that we need those houses, but there is another way. He has completely sacrificed renters in order to unlock this, but there is another way. I know people of my age across Mayo - people I play football with - who have planning permission and who were given prices by their builders, but they are not building. This is because of the cost of building. What has the Minister done for those people? He has done nothing since he came to office. His predecessor did nothing for those people either. We need to address the cost of building. We can do that by removing the VAT on construction. The North of Ireland does this. I ask the Minister to engage with this proposal. It would make a dramatic impact in reducing the cost of building. Last year, the State took in €3 billion in the middle of housing crisis. I ask the Minister to give some of this back to unlock the potential that exists.
Development levies, Irish Water connections, ESB connections and bonds to local authorities are precluding developers from taking the risk of building houses. The other aspect relates to planning. It can cost in the region of €100,000 to get planning permission over the line. These are practical suggestions that the Minister could implement in the morning if he wanted to unlock private housing delivery across the country.
There is an elephant in the room when it comes to housing. Everyone in opposition and in government is entirely focused on discussions on the supply side of this equation, and the Minister has failed in that regard. We must also address the demand issue and the immigration issue. For example, in 2014-15, the State was issuing in the region of 10,000 work permits a year. However, we are now issuing in excess of 40,000 employment visas in the State. The number of residency permits has also ballooned. I appreciate that the labour market is hot and that these immigrants are providing value in the market, but this is putting immense pressure on services and, in particular, housing. I have not heard the Minister discuss that yet, even though this is a way to address and alleviate the difficulties and provide part of the solution at least. In the absence of supply and as we are so far short of our targets, this is something we should consider.
I am aware of international students who have come to the country seeking an education and got a visa. They had to return home because there was no place to live. It is about time for the Minister to engage with his colleagues in government to manage this process. We need to provide visas where there is a critical need, for example, in the construction industry, in healthcare and in other sectors of the economy. However, it is shocking that this is a part of the equation that is not even being discussed by the Government.
Mattie McGrath (Tipperary South, Independent)
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Tá triúr cainteoirí againn agus tá ceithre nóiméad ag gach Teachta.
As far as I can see, everything is an emergency. The housing situation has been handled so badly for so long that it is now a crazy situation. The Members from Independent Ireland - so called Saor Éire, the freedom fighters - talked a few weeks ago about 100% mortgages. Who can take them seriously? They got detached tonight from their leader, Mary Lou McDonald. For the past few months since the election, they have been clucking around after her and under her umbrella as if she were a hatching hen. However, there must have been a split in the camp. They have gone back to where they were.
There are many issues, and Irish Water has been mentioned. The infrastructure is not there. This morning, the ESRI made a statement. The situation is chronic. Many villages and small towns do not have the capacity to build water treatment plants. In many cases where there are developer-built plants, there are issues with councils taking them in charge. I know they can and will provide the infrastructure, and will do so fast. Deputy O'Donoghue mentioned something, and I support him on it. We should separate the foul water from the sewer water. We have immense pressure on our septic tanks and sewerage systems. We cannot have the rainwater going into that and putting huge pressure on it. That is a no-brainer. What is needed is simple to do, especially with new developments, but it could also be done with many old developments.
The Minister floated an idea some time ago which gave great hope to people who live in cabins and behind houses in different areas. Something meaningful needs to be done about this. He knows and I know that there are hundreds of these cabins in his constituency and in mine. There are thousands throughout the country. They are one of the prongs to sort out the crisis that exists. They are very suitable as starter homes or whatever, and they are fine.
As Deputy Lawless mentioned, immigration has a massive impact on housing. I know we need nurses and doctors, and many of them do a great job in our hospitals. However, we must face the elephant in the room. I refer to the fact that the huge immigration is adding major pressure, but we are not going to talk about it. We are the great saviours of Europe. We can bring everybody in and find homes for them. Roderic O'Gorman told them all they would have their own front doors in 12 weeks if they came. He sent out a tweet in 13 or 14 languages. In the name of God, when are we going to get real and look after our own. We have a Taoiseach who travels the world and talks about the world's problems, but he is forgetting about the problems here. Looking after our people here first is his fundamental duty under Bunreacht na hÉireann.
Dundrum House hotel in Tipperary has been made into an IPAS centre despite the local people there protesting about this for more than 12 months. We were called to a meeting last night by the county manager to say the council, had erred in granting a section 5 exemption to a greedy, shabby, shoddy developer with a company brought in from Spain with declared capital of €120. We now we find it has all fallen on a heap of brus. A local group rightly took a judicial review, and now the council has had to cave in and say it erred in granting a section 5 exemption. What is going to happen? Will that contract be declared null and void? It should be declared null and void. It is null and void because it was granted under false pretences.
We have people before the courts, including Seán Meehan who is facing jail because of his situation with a log cabin. There are rogue developers who have no interest in humanitarian issues. They are interested in filling their pockets, making them fatter and destroying a village like Dundrum in County Tipperary which has a population of 200 by giving approval for an IPAS centre for 277 people, an illegal development that the council was told it was illegal. The fire officer had the cheek to tell us yesterday that he never visited the site once in the previous 12 months. That is the type of blackguarding you are going on with here. You need to get real.
9:30 am
Carol Nolan (Offaly, Independent)
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Tá áthas orm an deis a fháil inniu chun labhairt ar an mBille seo. Baineann an Bille seo leis an éigeandáil tithíochta atá ar siúl faoi láthair. I welcome this Bill. In particular, I welcome the call to fully restore and increase funding for vital homeless prevention schemes, especially the tenant in situ scheme and housing first. This issue has arisen at my constituency clinics. People are coming to me after experiencing the desperate disappointment of being told that the council or their landlord could not or would not enter into the tenant in situ scheme.
I will use the brief time available to highlight once again that we have a serious number of approved housing bodies, AHBs. This needs to be tackled. Is this value for money? There are 437 AHBs on the official register. I doubt that is value for money in that. In many cases, I doubt these entities are contributing a vital and important service, such as offering shelter. They offer shelter to victims of domestic violence. However, I feel they should be contributing more and that there should be value for money.
In regard to the 437 AHBs in a country this size, it begs the question about massive levels of duplication and the appropriateness of funding. I absolutely agree that we have to use all levers at our disposal to try to put solutions in place to solve our housing crisis. However, there is a sense emerging that what we have here is almost akin to a homelessness industry.
Aengus Ó Snodaigh (Dublin South Central, Sinn Fein)
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Gabhaim buíochas leis an Teachta.
Aengus Ó Snodaigh (Dublin South Central, Sinn Fein)
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Tá trí nóiméad aici. Ghlac an Teachta Mattie McGrath ceithre nóiméad.
Carol Nolan (Offaly, Independent)
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Nach bhfuil níos mó ama ná sin agam?
Aengus Ó Snodaigh (Dublin South Central, Sinn Fein)
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Bhí trí nóiméad ag an Teachta Nolan ach ghlac an Teachta Mattie McGrath ceithre cinn leis an méid a dúirt sé.
Danny Healy-Rae (Kerry, Independent)
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I am glad to get the opportunity to talk about housing again. This is a crisis. Everyone recognises that it is a crisis. I am not one bit happy that landlords or homeowners are being blamed for what is happening in the rental sector. Every site seems to be pointing at people who own houses and are trying to rent them out. I point out that I do have no house only my own. There are many vacant houses. I have asked the Government before to halve the tax or do something with it, such as 50% tax for someone who gets €1,000 in rent for a house. So many houses are idle, and there is no incentive to rent them out. Then people are afraid that they will not get their houses back.
In regard to planning permission for those who wish to build their own houses, people in County Kerry have been left behind on this. We have been hard hit by the urban regeneration pressure clause that deprives many young fellows who are four or five miles outside the town. They cannot get permission to build their own houses. Killarney has been in a pressure zone for more than seven years. Houses there are terribly scarce and terribly expensive. I do not see how what is proposed is going to help the housing sector. We must build more houses. We need to give local authorities more autonomy to build more houses. Long ago, when people were homeless, a county council would bring in demountable homes. That facility is no longer there. If you had a site, you get a place in a couple of days.
Another thing which has to be remembered is that the figures are going up, but we are housing more immigrants and housing more than our own. I fear no provision has been made for that. Reduce the tax and incentivise people to let their vacant houses out. That is necessary to tackle the problem of those empty houses. A vacant house provides no tax for the Government. We should take less tax in respect of such houses and do the same around the country for the other landlords. People would be far more interested in letting out their houses as a result.
Michael Cahill (Kerry, Fianna Fail)
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We need to zone land and open up planning permission for people, especially for one-off houses. We need to provide affordable houses and social houses. We need to provide private housing, low-cost sites and good-quality modular homes. We need to give choices to our people. I am convinced that good-quality modular homes are part of the solution here. Four or five modular homes can be provided for the price of one affordable house. They are better insulated and much warmer. They can be erected at speed.
I am focusing on modular homes because I meet young couples in every town and village in Kerry. I meet people in Killarney, Dingle, Killorglin, Cahirsiveen, Kenmare and Castleisland. I meet their parents. They would be very happy with modular homes because they are desperate. That is the bottom line. Plenty of land is available in Kerry from the HSE. It has not been used in years, and there are plenty of buildings also that could be quite easily turned into one- and two-bedroom homes. Negotiations between the Kerry County Council and the HSE have been going on for as long as I can remember.
We need to put the skids under Uisce Éireann regarding the provision of wastewater treatment facilities. We have up to 40 villages in Kerry where there is no sewerage treatment. I am a big believer in constructed wetlands. They are much cheaper, they are a success and they can be provided in a much shorter period. We must start providing cluster-type developments and, as others mentioned earlier, we must allow developers to provide the treatment facilities. Uisce Éireann is not going to do it.
Above all else, we must give our people choices. That is why I have put forward four or five different options. Otherwise, we will not reach our targets. I also look forward to the €100,000 over-the-shop grant being introduced. It will be a budgetary measure that will help with the provision of more accommodation.
John Cummins (Waterford, Fine Gael)
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I thank the Deputies very much. I echo many of the comments made by the Minister, Deputy Browne, and take this opportunity to reassert the Government's commitment and determination to tackling the challenges we all know exist in the housing sector.
The Minister and I are very much aware of the difficulties being experienced by some people in accessing secure and affordable accommodation. I say respectfully that I listened to many of the contributions, some of them genuine. Some Members put forward solutions. The contributions of many others just involved grandstanding, false outrage and attempts at creating clips for social media. The Members in those cases offered absolutely no solutions.
The Minister, this Government and I are as aware as anyone else of the difficulties people face. There is no such thing as a monopoly on compassion when it comes to matters to do with the housing sector. For this reason, we are working day in and day out to make substantial changes to increase the supply of social, affordable and private homes throughout our country. While there is still much to do, the Opposition motion this evening does not fairly represent the efforts and progress made to date.
As a Government, we are committed to delivering 300,000 new homes between this year and 2030. We are targeting an average of 50,000 homes annually over the period.
These new targets are ambitious but they provide a pathway to delivering the scale of housing needed. As a reference, these new targets are more than double the output of the last five years. There are no doubt challenges and barriers to addressing these numbers, but I want to reiterate our strong commitment and determination to tackle these. As Minister of State with responsibility for planning and local government, I know the important role of the planning system as a critical piece of the solution to the housing challenges we face. I will outline some of the progress we have made in recent months in that regard shortly.
The Minister, Deputy Browne, has outlined the progress made under Housing for All and referred to the new successor plan, which will incorporate pragmatic actions to boost housing activity in the short term as well as longer-term actions that will implement systemic change and help achieve the sustainable levels of supply needed in the long term. However, we are not waiting for this plan. We are consistently bringing forward a series of policy decisions because we recognise that no single policy approach, decision or silver bullet will solve the housing challenges we face.
The Opposition motion states that there is chronic underfunding of our local authority housing and planning departments, which must be reversed for councils to play a key role in meeting public housing needs. That is simply not the case. On the contrary, the Government continues to support local authorities in the delivery of its housing programmes, with almost €4.8 billion provided to local authorities in 2024. This will increase further in 2025. Local authorities derive income from a variety of sources but my Department has provided funding for more than 250 additional capital posts in local authorities to support social housing delivery. In addition, more than 140 professional, technical and administrative posts dedicated to delivering affordable housing have been funded by the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage, to strengthen our local authorities' capacity to initiate, design, plan, develop and manage housing projects in their areas.
The Government has also progressed a series of reforms to support a streamlined and well resourced planning system. This includes the consolidation and streamlining of planning legislation under the Planning and Development Act 2024. This Act represents the most comprehensive review of planning since 2000 and will reform and streamline the planning process, reducing delays in housing and strategic infrastructure projects. Furthermore, the ministerial action plan on planning resources will strengthen the planning system and ensure there are timely decisions for critical infrastructure and housing. The national planning framework has been referenced by a number of Deputies. This provides the basis for the review and updating of regional, spatial and economic strategies and local authority development plans. Given the urgent need to ensure that updated housing requirements can be incorporated into the planning system as quickly as possible to address housing need and demand, local authorities will be required to vary their county development plans. This is a key priority of Government. We want to ensure that what has been agreed under the NPF is translated to a local basis as urgently as possible. In that regard, the Minister, Deputy Browne, has written to local authorities. We will update local housing growth requirement figures shortly to the local authorities.
As part of the implementation of the Planning and Development Act 2024, new urban development zones are a new part of the planning system and have the ability to be transformational. The ability for local authorities to start work on that immediately has been commenced and will dovetail with the variation process. Further, the planning and development (amendment) Bill 2025 was approved by Cabinet for priority drafting on 27 May, which will ensure sufficient time is given to activate planning permissions for much-needed housing across our country. It is intended to have that Bill passed before the summer recess.
A number of Deputies referred to exempted development. In this regard, an exempted development regulation review has been undertaken by the Department. It is intended that a four-week public consultation will commence, hopefully by the end of next week. That includes reference to modular homes to the rear of the dwelling, which a number of Deputies have raised and which I know will be helpful for many families in providing housing options. Of course, it will not be suitable in every circumstance but it is about providing options for people. Reference was also made to infrastructure and the ability of the private sector to deliver in terms of developer-provided infrastructure. My view is clear, and on the record, that we need to facilitate this, particularly in smaller settlements, to ensure housing delivery can be unlocked, particularly to a set standard and design that can be taken in charge. Work is ongoing within Government in that respect.
An Coimisiún Pleanála will be formally established tomorrow. This is also a significant reform which will ensure that we have greater certainty on when a decision can be expected within our planning system. Nobody expects a positive decision but they expect certainty on timelines. That is what we are seeking to achieve with the establishment of An Coimisiún Pleanála. Progress has been made. Cases are down from approximately 3,600 two years ago to 1,300 cases on hand. We have statutory timelines in place which we expect the new commission to ensure are adhered to.
The issue of vacancy and dereliction is also a significant focus of Government and a significant focus of mine in my engagement with local authorities around the country. Some local authorities are doing excellent work in respect of compulsory purchase orders. Others like my own in Waterford have done tremendous work using the likes of the repair and lease scheme. However, it is true to say that there is not a standard approach across the country from local authorities, which does have to change. We have put significant money behind this. We have provided a €150 million under call 3 of URDF to provide local authorities with the firepower to be able to use CPOs to their advantage to tackle vacancy and dereliction. We also have the vacant property refurbishment grant, which was mentioned. It provides up to €70,000 if a property is derelict. More than 8,652 grant approvals have been issued already to the end of Q1 of 2025 and €112 million has been paid out to refurbish almost 2,100 homes. We have also extended the local authority home loan to help finance the purchase and renovation of derelict and non-habitable properties. Of course, this will continue to be a focus of Government. If there are proactive measures that the Opposition wishes to bring forward specifically in this area, I am more than willing to take them on board.
In conclusion, social, affordable and private delivery of homes across the country is the number one priority for Government and will remain so. We will not be distracted from doing our job by efforts at sound bites for social media. We will continue to focus on our job, day in, day out.
9:40 am
Máire Devine (Dublin South Central, Sinn Fein)
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You are doing a very poor job.
Matt Carthy (Cavan-Monaghan, Sinn Fein)
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We should just rename this debate the "black is white" debate. The Government is essentially trying to convince us that black is white. To have the audacity, as Ministers have done this evening, to come into this House and claim that their housing plan is working is akin to trying to convince people that the Earth is flat. The thousands of people who were outside this House this evening, demanding that we raise the roof, demanding of their elected representatives that we raise the roof on their behalf, know the reality of the record of the parties in government. House prices and rent costs through the roof, homelessness figures beyond anything anybody could have imagined. On every single metric the situation is getting worse, every day, week and year that Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are in government supported by Independents. Unless the policies that have been put forward time and again by Opposition parties, civic society groups and experts across the field, including in tonight's motion, unless and until those policies are enacted, the situation is going to get much worse.
In reality, this means the young people who have just finished their leaving certificate examinations do not see a future for themselves in this country. They are well qualified and many of them will go and get the best university education in the world. They will be highly qualified, highly motivated and very talented and they will be in a position to get a job, but they will not be in a position to take that job because they will not be in a position to find somewhere to live.
It is time for change. It was correct and right that people travelled to Dublin to the Raise the Roof protest. I hope this is a sign of hope that people are going to stand up and demand change because absolutely no hope is coming from this Government.
9:50 am
Sorca Clarke (Longford-Westmeath, Sinn Fein)
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What those crowds outside the gates during the Minister of State's ten-minute speech heard was waffle and spin. They live the reality of this Government's failed housing policies. Their families, friends and co-workers live this reality. They know as well as we in opposition do that the Government at this stage might as well be a meme for fiddling while Rome burns when it comes to housing, because that is what it is doing. Instead of putting on its big boy socks and admitting its policies are wrong, it comes along with hare-brained notions to strip away protections from renters, propose more tax reliefs for vulture funds, further delay social and affordable homes and throw students to the wolves, all in one fell swoop.
In my constituency of Longford-Westmeath, we do not need statistics because we live this housing crisis every day. Families are sleeping in overcrowded box rooms and sofa surfing and young adults are forced to leave for far-off countries because there is no realistic pathway for them under this Government to ever own a house or rent an affordable one. Entire generations are being exiled from communities because of sky high rents.
While homes lie empty, what is the Government doing? It is dithering. Derelict homes rot while people struggle to put a roof over their heads. This is not a crisis but an absolute disgrace. Older residents are contacting me who have worked all their lives and are now facing eviction into homelessness because they rent privately with no security and no plan for their later years. Students are commuting hours every day because there are no affordable houses, and this is before the Government's measure comes in. Public sector workers - our teachers and guards - are priced out of their own communities. Does the Minister of State not see this as the reality of the situation? We do not need any more gobbledygook press releases. We need emergency actions. We need real rent controls, taxes on vacancies and public houses built at scale on public land.
Natasha Newsome Drennan (Carlow-Kilkenny, Sinn Fein)
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Has the Minister of State ever stepped back and reviewed the performance of Fianna Fáil in running the Department of housing over the past few years? I refer to a performance review, so to speak, because from the outside looking in, the performance of Fianna Fáil in the Department of housing is looking disastrous and in need of a complete overhaul.
Across Kilkenny, we have dozens of council-owned homes left boarded up simply because the Minister of State's Department only allows an insulting €11,000 to do each home up. As a result, we see many of these homes being left empty for years. In my home county of Kilkenny, there has been a staggering 86% reduction in building commencements compared with the same period in 2024. In the first quarter of 2024, approximately 500 buildings were commenced across the county. This year, it has plummeted to 61. We have watched as rents steadily increased by over 10% this year, and it is showing no let up. The cost of renting is now nearly 60% higher than before the pandemic.
I was delighted to see the KCLR roadshow programme covering the work of the local homeless charity today. We are very fortunate in Carlow-Kilkenny to have the Good Shepherd Centre Kilkenny and Tar Isteach Housing, because without them, God knows what would have happened to the hundreds of families left facing homelessness that these charities are now housing. The Government certainly was not stepping to the fore. Little to no concern is shown for the struggles of renters by this Government. We cannot lose sight that behind all these numbers and statistics are people, families, children and elderly people, left feeling lost and with a sense of hopelessness because of this housing crisis. This is, sadly, the most painful review of the Government's performance in the Department of housing.
Donna McGettigan (Clare, Sinn Fein)
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Students are among the most mobile of all renters and will be disproportionately and negatively impacted by this new measure. I questioned the Minister for further and higher education in a committee meeting to ask what measures would be put in place to protect students against the impact of these changes. It was clear that students had not even been taken into account when the changes to rent pressure zones were considered. It was not reassuring that this point had to be raised at the committee and I felt students were never thought of in the first place. Students are also dealing with the accommodation crisis and they have to compete in the private rental market. Some end up in insecure and unregulated digs. While some digs and similar accommodation are great and help with the accommodation issue, some shocking and disturbing reports are coming from students of having no choice but to avail of these digs.
The Minister for further and higher education said yesterday that students should not be inadvertently disadvantaged and he wants exemptions to the new rules to be considered for students. Then this morning, the Minister for housing conceded it would not be possible for students or other short-term tenants to have special exemptions. This half-baked, makey-uppy type of measure, therefore, is just not good enough.
Children in hotel rooms need stability in their lives, not a Government that will leave them high and dry to grow up in hotel or hostel rooms. Three generations of families squashed under one roof need homes of their own. Children who grow up in emergency accommodation can be deeply impacted. Their sense of security and of belonging can be deeply affected. Parents are made to feel like failures because they cannot get a home for their children, when in actual fact it is the Government that has failed them. It said it has put billions of euro into housing and yet our homeless figures continue to climb each month, now reaching over 15,000. The Government did not meet its targets last year and reports are now saying it will not meet them this year. Will the Government tell those young people who have had to leave our shores it is doing a great job and they should come back and pat it on the back?
One question needs to be answered. Will the Minister of State tell the House what cohort of people is guaranteed under these changes to rent pressure zones not to have its rents raised in the next couple of years?
Dessie Ellis (Dublin North-West, Sinn Fein)
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I thank all those who took part in the cross-party Raise the Roof motion on the housing crisis. I also thank all those who took part in the Raise the Roof protest at the Dáil tonight. There will also be a Raise the Roof rally in Cork city on 21 June at 2 p.m. and CATU will have a national housing demonstration on 5 July in Dublin. We urge people to come out and support them.
Having listened to the speeches during the debate tonight, especially from the Government and those who sit on the Government benches, we get the impression things are okay and there is no emergency crisis in housing. The Government is living in a parallel universe quite different from the reality I have experienced in my office and in the community. Never have I seen such desperation and despair, with people and families regularly being made homeless, uprooted and spread across Dublin and elsewhere.
Did the Government never ask itself why this was happening? Did it never ask why the housing and homeless figures were continually rising, why people were not able to find a rental property, now costing over €2,000 and €3,000 a month in Dublin, why people were struggling to buy their own homes and why landlords were looking to get their properties back? The reality is this Government has failed to deliver enough social and affordable housing, even missing the low targets set out in its own programme for Government. Its overreliance on the private sector and support for vulture funds has added to the cost of housing. The average price of housing in Dublin is over €450,000, while the average nationally is €360,000 and rising. People are leaving this country mainly because of the cost of housing, whether for purchase or rental. The local authorities should be the main drivers of delivering social and affordable housing and should be financed accordingly. It is time the Government listened to the people and not bury its head in the sand with its failed policies.
Aengus Ó Snodaigh (Dublin South Central, Sinn Fein)
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Beidh an vóta seo tógtha ag an am céanna leis na vótaí eile istoíche amárach. The division is deferred until the weekly division time tomorrow evening.