Sarah O'Reilly (Aontú) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister and thank him for coming to the Chamber to hear what we have to say. Homelessness is at an all-time high. As of March, it was 11% higher than it was in the same month last year. There are 15,378 people living in emergency accommodation and that number includes 4,653 children. This is equivalent to 155 full classrooms of children living in uncertainty and stress, without permanent housing.

These numbers are stark enough, but what is often lost in this shocking legacy of homelessness is the hidden homelessness, the people who are not recorded in the statistics but who are staying on friends’ couches, sleeping in their cars or, as in cases in Cavan and Monaghan, tucked away behind ditches in mobile homes. Cavan and Monaghan are littered with mobile homes behind every ditch you pass on the road. People have been locked out of the housing market and, in an attempt to put a roof over their heads, they have invested in mobile homes and caravans. The issue is these families are living in constant fear of being served enforcement notices by local authorities as they may not have planning permission for their mobile homes. The recent move to ease the planning laws for cabins and modular homes in back gardens is a welcome development but I would like to see the relaxation extended to mobile homes, even temporarily, while we are in this crisis.

I have worked closely with a family in County Cavan who are petrified they will be evicted from the mobile home they live in behind their parents’ home. After being approved for a mortgage, the wife became pregnant and, because she was seen as a dependant, the mortgage was withdrawn from them. They used the money they had saved as a deposit to buy a mobile home, but they never realised the mobile home needed planning permission as it was on wheels. The current rules around cabins and modular units are bizarre and ludicrous. The fact that modular units of 40 sq. m attached to existing structures do not need planning approval but stand-alone units do makes little sense to me. Eoin and Maria McGovern have two little babies. They work hard. All they did was try to fend for themselves. Can the enforcement order served on them now be lifted? They have gone through enough. The Government could, theoretically, build an accommodation centre for asylum seekers in the field next to this family, for hundreds of people to live in, without a single sentence appearing on An Bord Pleanála's website. Yet this young couple and their two babies have been threatened. An enforcement notice has, harshly, been served on them for parking a mobile home in their back garden where it is not even visible from the road. Why is the Government hell-bent on punishing citizens who work hard? Why are they being treated so harshly? Prior to Storm Éowyn, I rang the couple to see what provision they had made, given that a red warning had been put in place. A local hotel in Cavan town had already been in touch before me to offer them a night's accommodation.

While I welcome the proposed planning changes, it must be extended to mobile homes. We also need a commitment from the Government that those currently under pressure and under threat of eviction will have a stay put on their eviction until the change is made. There are people who can build their own houses, but what is stopping them is the bureaucracy and the prohibitive cost of connections to the ESB, water and wastewater. Investment in serviced sites for young people must be seriously considered.