Paul Gavan (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I am being very nice but I take the Cathaoirleach's point.

Anyone familiar with the housing crisis knows that right now, it is getting worse not better. We had a meeting in Limerick the other night, which was packed to the rafters and was attended by Dr. Lorcan Sirr. He also attended the Fianna Fáil Ard-Fheis a couple of years ago and is not a member of any political party. He made a couple of very salient points, namely, that first-time buyers are being completely squeezed in the marketplace, with a 30% reduction in Dublin, because this Government continues to follow the Fine Gael policy of tax breaks for institutional investors and vulture funds, and the build-to-rent market is squeezing out people. Dr. Sirr also made the point that we are just not doing enough to build local authority homes. Shockingly, not one home was built last year in the Taoiseach's constituency and, even more shocking, in the constituency of the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, not one local authority home was built last year. This is the reality.

The heart-breaking stories we heard at that public meeting would chill Members in terms of the level of despair people are feeling. We are on the wrong track and the wrong road. Two years in, this Government is failing on housing and the debacle over the Land Development Agency is just the latest example. We proposed almost 100 amendments to give that agency the powers it needed and they were all rejected by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael people in this Chamber. It is time for an urgent debate on housing, which we are calling for.

The second issue is even more serious. Yesterday, I attended with others the meeting organised by Dóchas on what is happening in the Horn of Africa. I will give the House a couple of statistics. One person is dying from hunger every 48 seconds at present. Some 61% of people living in south Sudan do not have enough to eat and 350,000 children could die in Somalia in the coming months. This is the stark reality of another famine. We saw this happen ten years ago and we thought it would never happen again.It is happening again. Of course, it is being compounded by the war in Ukraine.

Dóchas very clearly asked for a significant increase in overseas development aid, ODA, funding. It asked for €233 million. I hope that, on an all-party basis, we can agree and passionately argue with Government for that funding to be included in this year's budget. We have to see justice for these people. It was truly shocking to watch videos from ten years ago and hear former President Mary Robinson talk about how there is no dignity in seeing a mother watch her child die. We are back there now. It was encouraging to see people from number of parties present at the event yesterday. I ask that we all work as hard as we can to ensure that there is a significant increase in the allowance for ODA in this year's budget to tackle this crisis. We must also use our seat on the UN Security Council to engage with other countries to ensure that we do not face another disaster. We lost 250,000 people in 2011. The world cannot let that happen again.