Jennifer Murnane O'Connor (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I am a committee member and I was at a meeting. We all attend other meetings. Last week, figures for homelessness rose above the 10,000 mark. According to the Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government, 6,480 adults and 3,784 children were living in emergency accommodation in February. These figures included 1,707 families. The Minister said he was disappointed but disappointment is when something happens outside a person's control and it is not an appropriate response to what is an incredible rise in figures. The Minister should be mad and outraged and he should be finding solutions.

Rebuilding Ireland is not working, something I see in my own area of Carlow where homelessness is on the rise. Day in and day out, my heart breaks when I have another poor soul come to my office, broken, in tears and overwhelmed with disappointment because he or she has been passed over for a social house. I cannot tell such people why they were passed over because I do not know. There is no clear system for the public to know why or when a person will get their social house. When there is no system, there is no hope.

Last month, the United Nations condemned Ireland for what it called the financialisation of housing, accusing this Government of allowing multinational vulture funds to force tenants out of their own homes and to manipulate the market by buying up massive amounts of property at low cost and flipping them or charging hugely inflated rents. The report highlighted preferential tax laws and the weak tenant protections in our country, which I have raised in the Seanad and at committee meetings. On Monday, a Social Justice Ireland report stated that over 6,000 Irish people are living in substandard accommodation, which is unacceptable.

I ask the Leader to detail to this House what his response was to the letter he received from Leilani Farha, the UN special rapporteur, on the right to adequate housing. We were one of five countries to receive this letter and I understand she did not hold back on her criticism. I agree with her that we have no monitoring and no accountability mechanism. There is no transparency and no system to understand. In the end, the Government is failing.