Gerard Craughwell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister. This is the first time I have addressed him as Minister. Congratulations to him. He is a hard-working man and I am delighted to see him in the position. I also think he is ideally suited to the Department to which he has been appointed.

I am always unhappy about statements. I believe they are a waste of parliamentary time and it is a waste of the Minister's time to have happy-clappy statements about how well the Government is doing. The people on the ground know how well a particular Department is or is not doing. Leaving that aside, I want to place on record my gratitude and, I believe, that of everybody who is watching what is going on in the country, for the officials who work not just in this Department but in all Departments. They have been forced to move their work to their homes, they are trying to run their job and their families, and all of these things are going on together. I have to say that our public servants are wonderful people and we owe them an awful lot.

Covid-19 has delivered a number of home truths very quickly to all of us. The one thing that has come out for me is the old adage that the only certainty in this world is death and taxes; they are the only two things we can be certain of and everything else is uncertain. We are now living in a very uncertain time. It is important to point out today, for anybody who cares to tune in, that this too will pass. It will leave or we will get control over it. I applaud the Government's work and what it is doing with respect to the roll-out of the vaccine. I cannot imagine the amount of pressure that my colleagues are under to move vaccine into this section or that section of society, but what is being done is the ideal way forward.

Homelessness has been a plague on our society. I hate to say this but, for the last 20 years, I have been hearing Dáil and Seanad speeches claiming that we are going to make housing affordable for the ordinary individual. I got married in the 1970s and I bought my first house as a corporal in the Army who was married to a nurse. My salary was not high and anybody who has been watching my speeches over the last number of years on the Defence Forces knows its members are not particularly well paid. However, I could get a mortgage and I could buy a house, and that is the important thing.

I am very pleased at the success the Minister has had in reducing homelessness and moving people from the hotels into, shall we say, a more permanent type of setting. However, I wonder, when I see the numbers, is it just the animal instincts of capitalism that have kicked in and that the Airbnb people have nowhere else to go with their accommodation other than to start renting it out. In The Irish Times, Fiona Reddan makes the point that, notwithstanding regulations that have been put in place with respect to Airbnb, there are loopholes like, for example, the 14-day let, the summer let or letting to corporate entities. She has also pointed out that if a person is operating on Airbnb for more than seven years, the chances of anyone being able to retrospectively stop that person, or to stop them going forward, are probably very slim. The Minister has an ideal opportunity, while Airbnb is on its knees, to bring in more stringent regulations to ensure that the housing stock in the country is there for the people of the country, and the animal instincts of capitalism can step back just a little bit and allow the ordinary Joe to be homed.

We all watched the RTÉ programme on homelessness a couple of days ago, particularly with regard to rough sleepers. Fair play to the Minister. He came out on that programme and he took responsibility for the issues that we saw, specifically with respect to a number of individuals who were not from Dublin but who had come to Dublin and could not get accommodation. He issued a directive and, for the most part, it is working.When I spoke to Fr. Peter McVerry this afternoon, he told me that things were working well. As soon as we had finished the conversation, however, he phoned me back to tell me about a young woman with a child less than one year old who had contacted homeless services in Dublin to say that she needed a home but to whom the response was given that they could not do anything for her because she was not on the housing list. Fr. McVerry is taking care of that case and I presume it will be resolved. I assume it has to do with an official somewhere to whom the word has not come down that the Minister said that anyone who needed a home would get one.

There is significant evidence to show that people end up sleeping rough because their first experience of a homeless shelter or homeless hostel was one of observing violence, drug use and fear. They feel safer on the street than they do in the hostels. We have learned from Covid-19 that rough sleepers need to be able to get single bedrooms in hostels or shelters, lock their doors, and know that they will sleep safely for the night and the property they brought with them will still be safe when they wake up in the morning and leave. That is something we need to ensure.

Not all sheltered accommodation and hostels are up to the standard I know the Minister would like, given that I heard him speak in the House on this matter many years ago and have since heard him speak on it in the Dáil. Single-room accommodation is the only way forward, but there must be independent inspections. A body such as HIQA needs to inspect hostels, not just during the day, but at night as well.

I wish to take a second to compliment Councillor Anthony Flynn who is constantly on the ground working on homeless issues and bringing issues for the vulnerable to our attention.

In the short time left to me, I wish to discuss affordable housing. We hear about it constantly. There is no affordable housing in Dublin if apartments cost approximately €430,000 and a couple must find a deposit of approximately €112,000 before they can even enter the market. I have a daughter who is renting accommodation. Young couples are paying between €1,800 and €2,000 per month. Some pay as much as €2,600. They are on combined salaries of between €70,000 and €100,000. They will never buy a house or get a mortgage. They will never ever get into the housing market. We must find a way of offsetting the rent they have paid as a recognition of their ability to pay a mortgage. I have spoken to the Minister about this suggestion previously. He is into the idea.

I implore the Minister to consider how to get people back buying their own houses in the private sector. We could get county councils to start building housing like they did in the 1950s and 1960s. That is something Fianna Fáil always did. When I was a young fellow, I watched some of that work being done in Galway down through the years. I would like to see us going back to those days. There are too many housing agencies in the country, all with chief executives and financial officers. Some of them do a fantastic job, but we need to rationalise the agencies and reduce them to a much smaller number.

I have gone over time. I thank the Minister for his time and wish him the best of luck as he proceeds.