Housing Schemes Dail Éireann — 2026-03-26 ============================================================ Sinéad Gibney (SD), Dublin Rathdown I welcome the opportunity to raise the issue of the maintenance of social housing in Dún Laoghaire and Rathdown. I am a TD for the Rathdown constituency and there is often an assumption it is an affluent area only. I have to say I have made it my business to make sure those living in deprivation in my constituency know I will represent them in Dáil Éireann as the only Opposition TD and a new TD in the constituency, because many people in the community are simply forgotten. My team and I have got a huge number of queries about this and I have visited some of the homes to see for myself. I have genuinely been appalled at the standard of accommodation that some of our social housing residents live in. The key issue is that they are simply living in substandard conditions and I would like to get into some of the detail around it. There are blocks of flats all with the same issues of damp and mould but tenants are sometimes told it is their fault when clearly these are structural issues. I have spoken to families who have been told that while their living conditions are inadequate, they are not eligible for transfer because they are in arrears. We all know the complexity and difficulty that people go through to get to a point of being in arrears and how difficult it is to get out of arrears. To compound this by stating their accommodation crisis cannot be fixed really is hugely problematic. Their health and well-being are severely impacted because they cannot pay rent for flats that are covered in mould and damp. I will bring this to life for the Minister of State, because when I went for these visits, I spoke to some of the families involved. There were lovely moments with the children, speaking to them about their experiences. Despite all the odds, they really are thriving in various ways, but they are facing such awful challenges. Some children cannot bring their friends around to play. Their parents cannot have their friends around for a cup of tea. They have to time activities because the smell can be so unbearable at various times of the day that they cannot use certain rooms. They have to recycle clothes and toys because they get so damp and covered in mould. This is one of the areas where we really see the price of poverty; because they cannot fix these issues, they end up bearing multiple additional costs. We have massive housing lists but it is absolutely crucial that we have the funding available for local authorities to maintain the housing stock they already have. This does not mean we need to jack up the rents, as happened recently with Dublin City Council, but by funding it centrally as a core part of what local authorities do and should do. I want to say from a human rights perspective how problematic this is. Obviously, we do not constitutionally recognise the right to housing, but if we accept there is a right for people to have a roof over their heads, if we do not provide for this and for adequate accommodation, it is so hard to realise the other rights that are fundamental to us, such as the right to education, the right to employment and the right to health. They are all impacted by the right to housing. Without a roof over our heads, it is impossible to realise them. I want to name-check specifically St. Nathy's in Churchtown, which I found to be in a particularly dire condition. I also want to call out the work of local groups, including the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, that help families in the area. They see the situations that people live in, which are simply not mirrored in the private tenancies people enjoy in the same neighbourhood. This is simply not good enough for me. The State and the local authority as a landlord have to acknowledge this. It drives people into places of shame and stigma. As I have said, there are so many other ancillary and knock-on issues that people experience because of this. We need to look at how local authorities can provide for adequate standards of social housing in the portfolio of offerings they have. Instead of saying we will wait for the next tranche of social housing, which again is an answer that some of these tenants get as they are told they will be available in the next tranche, we need to fix the conditions that people are living in right now. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-03-26/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:47+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-03-26