Paul Gavan (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

When I came back this time last year the first item I raised on the Order of Business was housing because of the horrendous state of the housing crisis. As we all know, it has got much worse since then. I will stick to the facts. The July homeless figure that I quoted last year was 10,568, including 3,137 children. In July this year it had gone up to 12,847 homeless people, including 3,829 children. That is a total increase of 2,300 additional homeless people, and 700 more children.It is an absolutely disgraceful record but it gets worse. When we look at the Government's housing targets for this year and the first half figures that were released, the target for this year is 5,500 affordable homes. Some 2,000 of those are through the controversial shared equity scheme and are not actually affordable but we will leave that aside for one moment. In the first half of the year, the Government delivered 101 affordable purchase homes through local authorities. Not one affordable home has been delivered by the Land Development Agency, LDA. The LDA has been in existence for four years now and there has not been one affordable home delivered. There were 22 cost-rental homes delivered by the approved housing bodies, so 123 houses is the record for the first six months in terms of affordable homes. Then we go on to the target of 9,100 new-build social homes. Again, at the halfway point of the year, just 1,401 of these were actually delivered. These results are just appalling. They are absolutely disgraceful. I find it hard to understand how there has not been action at Cabinet level given the continuing failure to address the housing crisis. I am calling for a debate on that.

The second issue I will raise briefly is the ongoing crisis in University Hospital Limerick. I get to raise two issues as I am under the three-minute mark. I am glad to say we are very strict on that.