Laura Harmon (Labour)

The Minister is welcome to the House. The way these measures have been communicated has been extremely confusing. Things were said at press conferences and in press releases. There were messages from the Minister and Taoiseach. This has been confusing for the public in general. The whole country should be a rent pressure zone in the long term. There is a huge missed opportunity in these measures to do that on a more long term basis.

Many of these measures will mean that there will be rent hikes for many people across the country, including students. Senator Boyhan mentioned this. I agree entirely with what he said. I get the impression that the Government's policy on housing is often being made on the fly and on the back of an envelope, judging by the way this has been communicated. We need a rent freeze in this country.

Why are students not being given the exemptions the Minister said he was considering? Why are they not being better supported? As somebody from Cork, I am concerned about students in Cork city because there are extremely low levels of purpose-built student accommodation there. Only 18% of the student accommodation in Cork is in public ownership, compared with 44% in Dublin, 56% in Limerick and 36% in Galway. This is shocking. I raised this with the Minister for Further and Higher Education, Innovation, Research and Science last week.

We need a student accommodation strategy. I was told in January it would be available before the summer. It is now June and I have been told perhaps we will have it by the end of the year. That does not give me much confidence. There needs to be more joined-up thinking between the Minister's Department and other Departments. In Cork city alone, there are 36,000 students, and that is just in the universities. The figure does not include all of the other colleges in the city. They need to be supported, along with the families who are often putting students through college. There needs to be more support for students living in digs and for the RTB. More resources should be provided to the RTB to ensure landlords are registered.

As I have said, the Government is failing in terms of housing. That is clear. New homelessness figures will be published next week. The homelessness figures, along with the rents and house prices, are rising. A whole generation is being locked out of home ownership in this country. That is why we had a protest outside Leinster House the other day. There will be a protest in Cork city on Saturday, attended by thousands of people across Munster.