Paul Gavan (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I second the motion.

The Minister of State is welcome. I want to start by quoting an email I received this morning. It is from a woman in Limerick who is overholding her current property because she has nowhere to go. She says she has a daughter who has her junior certificate coming up:

She recently got mental health breakdown at school as this housing situation is stressful for both of us. We have three cats so there is not an option for us to live in some hotel. Especially these places [that] are below minimum standards, I work from home and I need a proper place to live. I am [a] full time working single mother, I do not have any family here, I always worked hard, many times I had two jobs or been working up to 70 hours per week to be able [to] provide a decent life to my child. But I can not afford private renting as prices are above my wages and no one wants to accept Homeless HAP.

She goes on to say:

I am not looking for free accommodation, I'm here almost 19 years. Even when I was pregnant I had to work up to 70 h/week, I used to work 2 jobs, to provide decent life for my daughter. I went [a] long way from working part time as a waitress to work full time job, currently [for a] bank. I am living in “emergency accommodation" now as my lease ended last year so I [have] occupied this apartment illegally and my landlord keeps asking me to move out ... I am totally desperate and devastated by this situation. I can't sleep, it affects my job, my health and [my] mental health. I used to be [an] activist, I have organised many charity events, culture events, I used to be volunteering for Rape Crisis Centre and many other. Please help me as I really can't cope anymore.

Heartbreaking. It is a heartbreaking example of everything that is wrong in this country after 13 years of Fine Gael governments, with eight years of them propped up by Fianna Fáil in one way or another. I had a similar experience chatting to members of the INMO a few weeks back when we discussed the other key crisis the Government has failed in, which is the hospital crisis. They told me there were two key reasons driving our nurses out of our hospitals. The first is the state of the hiring crisis itself, and the horrendous extreme conditions they have had to put up with every day for more than a decade in a failing health system. The second is housing. They literally cannot afford to rent in a city like Limerick, or a city like Cork and they are choosing to leave. We know this. When I met the nurses a few weeks back there was a 200 nurse deficit in University Hospital Limerick because they cannot find nurses. There was, of course, the embargo which did not help, but they cannot find nurses who can afford to live in our cities. The reason for that - I know the Minister of State knows this - is more than a decade of failed housing policy, an over-reliance on the markets, and this determination to bring vulture funds in. What it means is we now have a whole generation locked out of housing. They cannot even afford to rent, never mind buy. In my village in County Limerick, it costs between €2,500 and €3,000 per month. How are working people supposed to afford those rents? Under this Government rents have only gone one way. We asked the Government to freeze rents. It refused to do it. We asked it not to lift the eviction ban. It lifted the eviction ban, and what do we have? We have record homelessness in this State. We have record house prices that ordinary families cannot afford, and we have record rents. A whole section of people, like the lady who wrote to me today, and who work for a living, cannot get the housing they desperately need. Rents in Limerick have gone up by 17.5% in the past year. Do we know anyone who has had a 17.5% pay increase in the past year. People are being squeezed and priced out of what should be recognised as a basic human right - the right to housing. That, of course, is another broken promise from this Government. It promised us a referendum on housing. There clearly is not going to be one. That is another broken promise. We then get to an absolutely devastating report written by the Housing Commission appointed by the housing Minister. The report clearly calls out a massive failure of Government and calls for a radical reset. As devastating as the report was, what was more devastating was the subsequent dismissal by the Minister, Deputy Darragh O'Brien. It is a pity he is not here tonight, although I welcome the Minister of State's presence. The chairperson of the Housing Commission, Micheal O'Flynn, who can hardly be accused of being a Sinn Fein supporter went on "Today with Claire Byrne" and said directly that the Minister has undermined the work of the commission. He pointed out that two and a half years of work went into this commission report. Perhaps the key finding of all was a deficit of 256,000 houses in our society right now. The word I like to use whenever we discuss housing is "accountability", because I have never yet heard Fine Gael acknowledge that this is its fault. When you are in government for 13 years and you wind up with a deficit of 256,000 houses, then you need to be accountable and hold your hand up to say it is on you. Who else is it on?What is the Government for if it is not there to provide decent housing for our people at prices they can afford? This is the most abject failure, and yet the Minister immediately dismissed the report. He also insisted, somewhat bizarrely, that most of the recommendations are already being implemented. Again, the chairperson of the Housing Commission was asked directly about this and said something very different. He stated he did not agree and that the vast majority - those were the words he used - of the recommendations made by the Housing Commission are not being implemented. There was a ten-minute piece about the matter on "Today with Claire Byrne". It is available on the RTÉ website. I recommend anyone watching or listening to these proceedings to take the time to listen to it because in one way it is more devastating than the report. The Housing Commission and its chair have stated, in a very matter-of-fact way, that the Government is failing on housing. One of the key recommendations in the report relates to the establishment of a housing delivery oversight executive. The Minister dismissed this out of hand and said we will not be doing that.

We have a Government comprising Fine Gael, which has been in office for 13 years, and Fianna Fáil, which has been there for nearly nine years, that has presided over systematic failure in respect of housing that has resulted in the worst homelessness crisis in the history of the State and in tens of thousands of our young people choosing to leave our country. A whole generation has been locked out of housing because of Government failure.

Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of all of this is that the radical rethink and reset that the Housing Commission, the Government's own body called for, has been rejected by the Government, which is intent, apparently, on just carrying on with more of the same. The dogs on the street will tell you that more of the same is not going to suffice. I have a son who is in university, and all of his friends are saying that they cannot see a future in this country because they want to leave home, like most young adults want to do. Perhaps the most devastating statistic of all, which was provided by the CSO, is that seven out of ten adults between the ages of 18 and 34 are living with their parents. The comparable figure for a country like Finland is one in 20. We have a whole generation of people locked in to not being able to move out of home and start a life. We have a whole generation of people whose lives are on hold because of the failures of this Government. Most damningly of all, the Government has never even acknowledged that it is responsible for this crisis. They are not delivering. We need radical change, and, frankly, we need a new Government.