Senator Gerard Craughwell- speech from 1 Feb 2021

Minister, you are welcome to the House. This is the first time I have addressed you as Minister. Congratulations. You are a hard-working man and I am delighted to see you in the position. I also think you are ideally suited to the department that you have been appointed to. Minister, I am always unhappy about statements. I believe they are a waste of parliamentary time. I believe they are a waste of your time. Happy, clappy statements about how well the Government is doing. The people on the ground know how well a particular department is doing or not. So, leaving that aside, I do want to place on record today my gratitude, and I believe everybody that is watching what is going on in the country, for the officials that work not just in your department but in all departments. They have been forced to move out to their homes. They are trying to run at their job, families, all of these things going on together, and I have to say they are wonderful people. Our public servants are wonderful people, and we owe them an awful lot. COVID-19 has delivered a number of home truths very, very quickly to all of us, and I suppose the one thing that has come out, for me, the only certainty in this world is the old adage, death and taxes. They are the only two things that we can be certain of. Everything else is uncertain and we are now living in a very uncertain time. It is important to point out today, for anybody that cares to tune into this, this too will pass. It will leave, or we will get a control over it. I would applaud the government's work on what they are doing with respect to the rollout of the vaccine. I cannot imagine the amount of pressure that my colleagues are under to move vaccine into this section or that section of society. I think what has been done is the ideal way forward. Homelessness has been a plague on our society. I hate to say this, but for the last 20 years I have been hearing Doyle speeches, Shannon speeches about, you know, we are going to make housing affordable to the ordinary individual. I got married in the 1970s. I bought my first house as a corporal in the army, married to a nurse. My salary was not high. Anybody who has been watching my speeches over the last number of years on the Defence Forces knows that they are not particularly well paid. But I could get a mortgage, I could buy a house, and that is the important thing. I am really pleased at the success you have had in reducing homelessness and moving people from the hotels into a more, shall we say, a more permanent type of setting. But I wonder when I see the numbers, Minister, is it just the animal instincts of capitalism that have kicked in and the Airbnb people have nowhere else to go with their accommodation other than to start renting it out? I was looking in the Irish Times and Fiona Redden makes the point that notwithstanding regulations that have been put in place with respect to Airbnb, there are loopholes there. Like, for example, the 14-day let or the summer let or letting to corporate entities. She has also pointed out that if you are running an Airbnb for more than seven years, the chances of being able to actually retrospectively stop you or to stop you going forward are probably very slim. Minister, you have an ideal opportunity now, while Airbnb is on its knees, to bring in more stringent regulations to ensure that the housing stock we have in the country is there for the people of the country. And the animal instincts of capitalism can step back just a little bit and allow the ordinary Joe to get homed. Minister, we all watched the RT programme on homelessness, particularly the rough sleepers, a couple of days ago. And I have to say, Minister, fair play to you, you came out on that programme, you took responsibility for the issues that we saw, specifically with respect to a number of individuals who weren't from Dublin, who found themselves in Dublin or who had come to Dublin and couldn't get accommodation. And you issued a directive and for the most part it is working. But I have to say to you, this afternoon speaking to Father Peter Macferry, he was actually saying things were working pretty well. We finished our conversation and as soon as we finished the conversation he was back on the phone to me to tell me about a young woman with a child under one year of age who had contacted homeless services in Dublin to say that she needed a home. And the response came back, she wasn't on the housing list, so they couldn't do anything for her. Now, I know Peter was taking care of that and I assume it will be resolved, but I would assume this is some official somewhere where the word hasn't come down that the Minister said if somebody needs a home, they get a home. With respect to the rough sleepers, Minister, there is significant evidence to show that people finish up sleeping rough because their first experience, if you want, of a homeless shelter or a homeless hostel is one of observing violence, observing drugs and fear, I suppose. So they feel safer on the streets than they do in the hostels. We have learnt from COVID-19 that they need single bedrooms, they need to be able to go into a hostel or a shelter, have a single bedroom, lock the door, know they will sleep safe for the night and when they wake up in the morning the property they brought in with them will be safe and they can take it away. And that is something we need to do. With respect to those who are providing sheltered accommodation or hostels, not all of them are up to the standard that I know you would like. Because I have seen you speak in the Shanad on this many years ago and I have seen you speak in the Doyle. Single room accommodation is the only way forward, but we need independent inspections. We need somebody like HICWA to go in and inspect these hostels, not just by day but by night also. I want to take a second to compliment Councillor Anthony Flynn, who is out there on the ground all of the time working in the homeless area, who is constantly bringing issues for the vulnerable to our attention. In the short time I have left, Minister, I want to talk about affordable housing. It is another thing we constantly hear about, affordable housing. There is no affordable housing in Dublin if apartments are costing somewhere around £430,000, where a couple have to find a deposit of about £112,000 before they can even enter the market. We have to find a way with young couples – I have a daughter myself who is renting accommodation – who are paying between £1,800 and £2,000 a month, some of them as high as £2,600, on combined salaries of maybe somewhere between £70,000 and £100,000. They are never going to buy a house. They are never going to get a mortgage. They are never, ever, ever going to get into the housing market. Minister, we have to find a way of offsetting the rent they have paid as a recognition of their ability to pay a mortgage going forward. I think I have spoken to you before on this and I think it is something you are very much into. So, Minister, with the short couple of seconds I have left, I would implore you to start looking at how we get people back into buying their own houses in the private sector. We get county councils to start building houses like they did in the 1950s and 60s. That was something Fianna Fáil always did, going back when I was a young fellow watching some of the work in Galway down through the years. I would like to see us go back to those days. There are too many housing agencies. There are too many housing agencies in the country, all with chief executives, all with finance officers. Some of them do a fantastic job. I think we need to rationalise that and bring it down to a much smaller number of agencies. So, Minister, I have gone over time. I want to thank you for your time and best of luck as you go forward.