Thomas Gould (Cork North-Central, Sinn Fein)

We need to treat the housing emergency in the same way we treated Covid. The whole of Government needs to get behind this, as does the Opposition, to come up with solutions. I do not want to see 4,653 children in emergency accommodation. I asked the Minister's predecessor how many children must become homeless before the Government finally accepts its policies are wrong. I will ask the current Minister the same question. How many children need to become homeless before you will put your hand up and say "We cannot fix it"? Someone needs to take responsibility.

I deal with families every day. I held a clinic on Monday. Of the 21 people I met, 17 had housing and four were homeless. This is on the watch of the parties opposite. Fine Gael has been in power for 14 years and Fianna Fáil for ten. It is getting worse every month. I and some other Deputies and Senators met with the Construction Industry Federation in Cork last week. The figures it supplied us with are unbelievable. In Ballincollig, the figure for what was supposed to be delivered for 2028 was 3,947. Does the Minister know how many planning permissions have gone in? Only 125. In Blarney, they have planning permissions in for only 10% of the figure that is to be achieved by 2028. I had a question to the Minister last week about the situation with thousands of local authority houses boarded up across the State. Will he not just give the local authorities the resources and funding necessary to get these out? I have advocated that there would be a team in place in every local authority area to retrofit these houses and allocate them straight away. We have 19 houses in Cork that have been empty for more than three years. It is a shame.

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