Dublin is in the midst of what is arguably the worst housing crisis since the establishment of the State. Private rental tenants are under huge pressure to make ends meet. Absolutely no progress has been made. Rents are going up every year. Rental property is only getting more difficult to find. Properties available under HAP, which has unfortunately become the backbone of our broken social housing system, are practically non-existent. Prospective tenants need to be making six-figure salaries to come anywhere close to affording rent in any new-build apartment complex in the city. In the docklands and elsewhere in the city, apartments and buildings are lying empty because only a miniscule proportion of the population can actually afford to live there and the developers will not lower the rents as that would reduce the speculative value of their properties.

The buildings lie empty while people sleep on the streets outside. In the middle of a housing crisis, homes are being treated like commodities that are built, bought and sold solely in the interests of the wealthy. Behind all the statistics, communities are being divided, split up and forced out from where generations of their families have grown up. Three and four generations of families are being forced to move out not because there is no housing in the area, but because the Government's policy on housing has meant that local inner city families cannot afford these insane eye-watering prices. What we have now are homes without people and people without homes in this city.

When the Government talks about its housing plan, which is called Delivering Homes, Building Communities, I find it ironic. The homes that the Government are delivering are not being delivered to inner city communities like the families of those in Mercer House or Digges Street Upper. These communities cannot afford to pay these eye-watering prices. It is dividing communities, not building them. We need the Minister for housing in here who, certainly for residents in the inner city, Pearse Street and Ringsend, the invisible Minister. We need to see him here to explain what he is going to do to support inner city communities.