Children's hospital and housing crisis
Deputy Doherty pressed the Government on whether the children’s hospital will open by 2026 and then raised the housing crisis and ESRI findings. The Tánaiste defended housing delivery, social housing and retrofitting, and said housing quality affects children’s well-being.
I will try again but the Tánaiste never gives a direct answer. I asked him a simple question. After spending €2.2 billion, there has been complete incompetence from the Government with the national children's hospital. He cannot even tell us if he believes the hospital will be open to treat children by 2026. That was a simple question.
I will try again about the Government's other fiasco, the housing crisis, which has a crippling effect on society. Many are unable to find a home or place to live. Today, we have the ESRI report on the impact of this crisis on a particular group of people, which is children. The report found that inadequate, cold and damp housing has long-term impacts on the physical and mental health of children, while mothers living in inadequate housing tend to have higher levels of depression, worse health outcomes and damaging knock-on effects on children. Children are so often the victim of the Government's housing policies. Does the Tánaiste accept the findings of the ESRI report that the Government's housing crisis is having an effect on the mental and physical health of children? How does he stand over that? What does he say to those families and their children today?
Comment on this
As the Deputy knows, the ESRI report is based on children born in 2008 and assesses them over a nine-year period. Without question, quality of housing impacts on the well-being of children and families. That is why we are building more social housing this year and the past three years. This Government has, notwithstanding Covid-19 lockdowns, substantially changed the dial in respect of house completions. We have also done far more than any other Government in retrofitting local authority housing to make the quality of housing better and also retrofitting more generally. There has been a dramatic increase in the retrofitting of houses across the country, which goes to the heart of the ESRI report, with better quality housing in the rental market, local authority housing and housing more generally. That is the way to deal with it. Without doubt, since 2020, post Covid, there has been a dramatic increase. An additional 110,000 houses have been delivered but we need to do much more.