I begin by offering my deepest condolences also to the family of the late Garda Kevin Flatley, his wife, Una, his children, Aoife and Erin, his entire community and his colleagues in An Garda Síochána. On behalf of the Labour Party, I pay tribute to Garda Flatley and the dangerous work he did, and all his colleagues do, in front-line policing. We all owe them an enormous debt for keeping our communities safe and we all think of that as we hear the awful news of his tragic death.

I also express sympathies to the families of the two young boys, Emmanuel Familola and Matt Sibanda, who died so tragically in a drowning incident in Buncrana, County Donegal. Those tragedies really brought home to us the dangers posed by water and the risk of drowning.

To have just one home lying vacant during a housing crisis is unforgivable but the level of vacancy and dereliction in Ireland today is an outright scandal. Approximately 160,000 homes are lying empty across the State or, rather, we think that is the number lying empty because the truth is that we simply do not know. On every street in every town, we see vacant buildings, vacant houses and voids, which are visual evidence of the failure of Government housing policy. We were all reminded of it yesterday with the news of the collapse of a terrace of Victorian cottages in my home area. Just along the Grand Canal, as morning commuters travelled to work and school, a terrace of houses, ironically, owned by and right adjacent to the Construction Industry Federation, CIF, headquarters, collapsed. It was embarrassing for the CIF for sure, but it was lucky that nobody was injured in the collapse. Emergency services had to be called to clean up the mess.

That is just one stark example of the scourge of vacancy and dereliction. Vacancy blights more than just streetscapes because whenever I raise it in this House, as I have many times, I see vacant stares on the Government side. Nobody in government seems to know the scale of the problem. It simply does not know how many empty homes there are in the country and the already minuscule tax on those homes is not being paid by those who are sitting on them and failing to put them to use. The lengthy bureaucratic compulsory purchase process has been simply ineffective in tackling this issue. It is not as though this is an issue that has just crept up on the Government. It should, by now, have worked out how to find out the scale of the problem and, crucially, how to tackle it. Yet. five years since Fianna Fáil took on the housing brief, no one in government is showing any ambition to get to grips with the problem of vacant homes. so we get vacant stares, vacant ministerial offices and vacant Government policies. We are told the Central Statistics Office is researching the extent of vacancy over past years and that will be welcome. What we do not know is how the Government will use that information.

Weeks ago, my colleague, Deputy Conor Sheehan, in a parliamentary question, asked the Department of housing to explain why vacancy has not been tracked but that portion of the question was not answered. When will we see the Department of housing take on the basic task of determining how many homes are lying empty? When will we hear from the Minister for housing about plans to tackle dereliction and vacancy and to supply local authorities with adequate funding so that they can take on this task?

I disagree with the Deputy's analysis of the Government's response to vacancy and dereliction. The vacant homes action plan progress report 2025 highlighted the breadth of action the Government is taking to support bringing vacant properties back into use as homes. Key areas of progress include the successful delivery of the vacant property refurbishment grant, with over 11,300 applications received, 7,700 approvals and over 1,400 grants issued as refurbishment works are completed. That amounts to €77 million paid out to support people bringing empty dwellings back into use as homes.

I have seen this all over the country. I have seen villages that had three or four derelict properties now without any derelict properties because people have availed of the derelict grants.

This is a very innovative approach that was taken by the last Government. It was introduced by the Minister, Deputy Darragh O'Brien. I was a strong supporter of it. It is a game-changer in respect of many derelict properties the length and breadth of the country. The vacant house grant is also quite significant. It facilitates the return of vacant houses as viable homes for people.

The latest available vacancy data from GeoDirectory comes from quarter 4 of 2024 and notes a decrease in the national vacancy rate to 3.8%. That is the lowest recorded since 2013. I take the point that there are different data sources but the overall trend is downwards and vacancy levels are reducing.

The standard answer today is more and more funding for everything but, in 2021 and 2022, we gave substantial funding to local authorities to deal with voids in their own local authority housing stock. Local authorities take too long to release homes that have been vacated. When homes are vacated because families have left or moved on for different reasons, it can sometimes take months or a year for the local authorities to fill those houses. They cite all sorts of reasons but it is not good enough. They are now looking for more grants to fill those houses. Voids should be filled fairly quickly. It should happen within a week or two of the house being vacated unless there is some structural issue. In the majority of cases, there are no structural issues because families have been living in them already. We need to keep pressure on where it matters. By all means, resources will be released. The resources being released for social housing, including voids, new builds and acquisitions, are way above anything that has been allocated in the last decade. There is no argument about that. However, there equally should be no argument about local authorities also having a razor-like focus on dereliction within their own domains. Local authorities should use and enforce the Derelict Sites Act. They should also make sure that voids under their remit are filled quickly.

Of course, we support any initiatives that will help to tackle the scourge of vacancy and dereliction but it is simply not good enough for the Taoiseach, as leader of the party that has held the housing brief for five years, to pass the buck to local authorities. That is not good enough. He speaks of a "razor-like focus" on tackling vacancy and dereliction. That is exactly what we are not seeing from his Government and his Minister for housing. We are seeing an absolute vacancy as regards policy. We hear from our councillors across the country that the resources available to local authorities to tackle voids are diminishing. Central government is undermining the capacity of local authorities to tackle vacancy and dereliction. We in Labour have supported local communities in bringing forward reports of vacant and derelict buildings and houses to local authorities so that we can help to be part of the solution to the problem. However, what we hear from our communities is immense frustration at delays in the process, the slowness of responses and, crucially, a lack of funding for local authorities from central government. It is not good enough for the Taoiseach to say that local authorities are not doing enough. The impetus and the driving focus must come from central government and from the Department of housing. That is precisely what we are not seeing at present. That is really evidenced by the collapse of derelict buildings as we saw so graphically yesterday.

Ní aontaím leis an Teachta in aon chor. Níl an ceart aici. Ní raibh na deontais atá ann anois maidir le tithe atá folamh agus mar sin de ann riamh. Is léir sin ón méid daoine atá ag fáil deontas sa lá atá inniu ann. I do not agree with the Deputy. The refurbishment grant for derelict buildings was not there four years ago. It has had a very significant impact and the Deputy should be good enough to acknowledge that.

We welcome anything.

The only criticism I remember was that a TV programme gave details of the grants. It was considered politically wrong to let the public know they could avail of a grant if they wanted to buy and refurbish a derelict building or vacant house. These grants have been spectacularly successful and we need more of them.

Some local authorities have been good on social housing but others have not been. We need to call that out.

Where is the central leadership?

It is not always about handouts. You can go around certain local authority estates and see six vacant houses. Millions are not needed to put those houses back into use. They should never be vacant for beyond a month. I am not just saying this now; I have said this to local authorities time and again. We have taken void initiative after void initiative.

The dependency culture kicks, that they will fill a void if given €50,000 or €60,000. No. If a house is idle because someone left it a month ago, it should be allocated again. We are in a housing crisis.