More than 100,000 people are currently on a waiting list for public authority housing, it was claimed in the Dail yesterday.
Mr Brian Hayes (FG, Dublin South West) said the public housing sector was in "crisis". There were more than 37,000 applications for public housing "representing over 100,000 men women and children who are looking for and waiting for local authority accommodation".
The Fine Gael deputy was disputing figures issued by the Minister of State with Responsibility for Housing, Mr Bobby Molloy, who said that in 1996 there were 27,427 households in need of local housing.
This compared to 1993 State assessment when 28,624 applications were made for housing. Mr Hayes said it took him just two days to find out that there were more than 37,000 applications currently for public housing.
He said it was about time the Minister's department "rejigged their audit unit, given the fact that the statistics are so completely out of date".
Mr Molloy said the deputy might have got his figures from the 37,718 households which were assessed in the 1996 appraisal. They included households whose needs could be met by other measures such as improvement works, rent supplementation, voluntary housing. The Minister added that 10,000 families would be housed this year through a number of measures including 3,900 new houses.
Mr Eamon Gilmore (DL, Dun Laoghaire) said the Minister should accept that the current housing assessments were no longer reliable "in view of the fact that there are thousands of people who cannot afford to buy a home of their own but whose income is too high to allow them to go on a local authority housing list".
Mr Joe Higgins (Socialist Party, Dublin West) called for the Minister to declare a "housing emergency" in view of the situation and to set aside emergency funds for a crash programme to meet the needs of those on the housing list, "so that workers on wages who would not previously qualify would now be eligible in view of the crazy rise in house prices".
He described current government funding for public housing as "hopelessly inadequate" and asked if the Minister was aware of the "most intense suffering that exists on the housing list, the overcrowding, the family tensions, the unbearable stress. Does he agree that the insane and obscene rise in prices for new houses is going to make that situation worse?"
Mr Molloy said he had already improved greatly the level of assistance available in the voluntary housing area. "This Government has provided a very substantial increase in the funding for public housing."
Even those who were allocated housing were finding that conditions in which they were living were becoming unbearable and "a lot of people are seeking transfers and that is an aspect that concerns me equally".
"The level of house building is at such a high pitch, that there is a problem at the moment to get builders available to build a house, that is another factor. There were actually 40,000 houses built last year in the public and private sector and that was a huge increase."