There are three issues I wish to raise in regard to housing. The first is homelessness; something we see across the length and breadth of the country, particularly in urban areas. I come from a rural part of the country, Sligo–Leitrim. We have a homelessness crisis. We have a lot of people sleeping out in doorways, which we did not have before. We have many people staying with relatives or friends or in their cars. It is something we have noticed in the past couple of months that has come to the fore. Big efforts are being made by the local authority but there simply is not enough homeless accommodation to deal with the crisis. We have single mothers with young children staying in hotels with no facilities to cook, wash and so on. These are serious issues that we need to deal with. The State needs to provide its own homeless accommodation. That needs to be looked at in every constituency around the country. They are simply not there. Local authorities are finding it very difficult to find homeless accommodation for people. They are sometimes taking children far away from the schools they go to try to find them somewhere to stay. Most of this involves people being given notices to quit and having to leave rented accommodation because the landlord is selling up or whatever, which is his or her entitlement. However, if the people do not have anywhere else to go, they are in a huge crisis. The second issue I wish to raise relates Uisce Éireann and water services particularly. The water in south Leitrim is produced in a plant beside the River Shannon in Carrick-on-Shannon. That covers all of south Leitrim through Drumshanbo, Ballinamore, right over to Carrigallen, Mohill and all of that region. It has been at 110% capacity for the past number of years. It is bursting at the seams. If a pipe bursts somewhere, people are without water not for a day or two, but for up to a week, because it has to take so long to fill reservoirs, etc., and the plant cannot cope with the capacity pressure on it. There is a real case for proper infrastructure to be put in place as far as Uisce Éireann is concerned, and it is the same with wastewater in many small towns around the country. If somebody goes looking for planning permission in any of those towns at the moment, they cannot get it because Uisce Éireann cannot guarantee the supply of water or in many cases wastewater services either. That is a serious issue. I know builders who want to build and do not have that. The final issue I want to raise is rural housing. A lot of my constituency is rural. We saw the report from the GAA recently across the whole western seaboard where the population is in decline in parishes and they are having serious issues. It is the same across many areas where we have declining populations yet people cannot build in their own areas where they want to build. Some of it is because of restrictions in place, and some of it is because of soil conditions or whatever else, but the result is the same everywhere. We have no families to keep the schools going and our rural parishes alive. The only way we can do that is to take emergency action to look at all of these rules and regulations again and set the rules aside to start to provide solutions for people. It is solutions that people want so they can live and flourish in their own regions.

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