Housing is the foundation of each and every life. Without it, you cannot plan, work, study, or simply live. Right now, nearly 17,000 people in Ireland have no home — among them over 5,000 children. It is widely accepted there are many more homeless, but they are not on official “lists”, thousands more live in precarious housing. In Galway alone, figures are sharply rising, with more families and older people entering homelessness than ever before. This is a national emergency, and it has been met with a decade and a half of government failure.
I will not accept this as normal.
Here is what I will fight for in the Dáil:
Build at the scale the crisis demands. Ireland needs at least 55,000 homes per year — including 15,000 social homes. Targets without annual accountability are meaningless. I will push for binding yearly milestones and immediate, ambitious state-led building, including in Galway's Gaeltacht communities, where not a single social or affordable home has been built in 15 years.
Bring empty buildings back to life. Thousands of vacant properties sit idle above shops and in neglected town centres. Refurbishment grants work — but the paperwork burdens and funding delays are driving people away. I will push to streamline these schemes and prioritise owner-occupiers over developer-led profit.
Stop homelessness before it starts. It costs the State 18 times more to run emergency accommodation than to keep people in their homes. Reinstating protections against no-fault evictions, expanding the Tenant in Situ scheme, and providing real exit planning for people leaving State care are not radical ideas — they are evidence-based and cost-effective. We simply need the political will to act.
Train the people who will build our future. We do not have enough skilled tradespeople to meet our housing targets. Adding building trades to the Critical Skills list, expanding apprenticeships in secondary schools, and supporting people on unemployment into the trades are practical steps we can take now.
Treat long-term homelessness with the wraparound support it needs. Housing alone is not always enough. People leaving addiction services, mental health services, or long-term homelessness need structured, community-based support to sustain a tenancy. Housing First works — we need to fully resource it.
We have the solutions. We have the evidence. What has been missing is urgency and political courage. Families in Galway cannot wait another five years for the Government to catch up.