Sinn Féin TD for Clare Violet-Anne Wynne has spoken out against the conveyer belt effect of families in need of social housing and the numbers of homes added to the social housing stock.  

Teachta Wynne said: 

“There are 3,000 people on the Social Housing waiting list in Clare. This number has not significantly reduced in a number of years.

“There were 347 homes brought into the social housing stock over the first 6 months of 2021, while 482 across the year of 2020.  

“Unsurprisingly, HAP accounts for the vast majority of the 124,749 solutions delivered between 2016 and 2020 (65 per cent). However, these figures are not just misleading, they’re downright wrong, with more than one in four of these HAP tenancies either failing or double-counted due to renewal. 

“In Q1 of 2021, in Clare alone the 229 additions to the ‘social housing’ stock – 212 of them were HAP properties. Which means they are fiscally ineffective as the rents are susceptible to sky-rocketing increases and they are not offering security of tenure to the tenants. 

“Taking the 59,821 active HAP tenancies as at Q4 2020 and the 61,880 households on the social housing waiting lists across the county, gives a total of 121,701 households. An increase of 30,101 households since 2016 (33%). 

“While in Clare alone between €2-2.5 million has been spent on roughly 400 RAS tenancies is also a dubious investment as these are equally insecure tenancies. They are not forever homes. They are not long-term.   

“If direct build, or acquisition of builds by approved housing bodies are not increased; we will never end the cycle of more families being unable to meet the costs of rent in the private housing market; cost-of-living crises and threat of homelessness and having nowhere to accommodate then.