Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

It appears to be a tactic of the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage to skip out of these debates and not listen to the Opposition on what the Government claims it believes to be the most serious crisis facing the country. It does not matter how we feel but I believe it is insulting to the people who are caught up in the housing crisis that the Minister is clearly employing a quite worked-out tactic in these debates. For the people who are really suffering extraordinary misery and hardship how could it induce anything but despair?

People think the Government does not care. I would like to think it is not true but increasingly I have to wonder. It is hard to interpret the Minister's departure from successive debates in any way other than that he just does not really care and he is not that pushed about how people are suffering. The fact is he spent the time he was in here having a go at the Opposition rather than dealing with the substantial issues Sinn Féin is putting forward in the motion. I thank Sinn Féin for tabling the motion. We will put forward some of the same proposals tomorrow morning with our eviction ban Bill. It does not bode well for the seriousness with which the Government takes this most serious of issues.

Something we should all consider is that the number of elderly people finding themselves in the most shocking situations is growing. In my time of dealing with the housing crisis, which is pretty much the entire time I have been in the House, it has tended to affect younger people or people with particular difficulties. There is an increasing prevalence now of elderly people who have worked all their lives finding themselves in very shocking situations. A couple came to me today, one of whom is working. The other had worked for many years but because of a heart condition and diabetes is no longer working. They are living in a storage cupboard. They can just about get a bed into it. They are in shared accommodation with many other people. One member of the couple is 67 and the other is 63. I could see their health has been seriously impacted. They were evicted from their previous accommodation on the grounds of sale. They do not get the housing assistance payment or rent supplement. They are surviving on the employment income of the female partner in the couple. They are in a really bad way. The husband who has diabetes and a heart condition is sleeping on the couch with the other people living in the shared accommodation passing by. It is shocking to do this to elderly people.

I am dealing with another man in his 70s. He has a severe spinal issue and he has been couch surfing for five months. We are still waiting for the council to process his medical priority application for housing. There is another couple whose case I have raised on a number of occasions. There was a little bit of coverage of it, although they want to remain anonymous and their identities have not been revealed. I accompanied them to the District Court on Friday. Their landlord, who by the way owns multiple properties, is evicting them and their two teenage children from the house they have lived in all their lives. They are a single income household. The husband has worked all his life for a semi-State company. As he is over the threshold, they are not entitled to the housing assistance payment or social housing.

I have asked, the Sinn Féin motion asks, and several members of the Opposition have asked whether we can purchase houses where people are threatened with the imminent prospect of homelessness, as this family is, to prevent them from being made homeless. We get a vague answers. I asked the Taoiseach today and he did not even understand the question. He thought we probably could but he did not understand about people being over the threshold. There is a complete lack of clarity. The local authorities tell us that if people are not on the social housing list the tenant in situscheme does not apply. This is what they are being told. This needs to change.

The only reason the family I am speaking about is being evicted is that the house is for sale. Why would the State not buy the house? I heard the Minister come out with rubbish earlier. He said we could be paying €500,000 for a house. This house is actually valued at €350,000, just to let him know. The Government is paying €400,000 and €500,000 for Part 5 all the time. What is he talking about? This is just rubbish. The question is asked as to how much rent the State would charge. Approved housing bodies do this all the time. They borrow money and the cost rental is set against 40 years to recover the cost of the house. The State has the ability to spread it out even further. The answer to how we would set the rent is to do so at an affordable level according to cost rental on a reasonable proportion of people's income as against what they would have to pay on the market out there.

The couple I accompanied into the court are in their late 50s. They have lived in the house with their two children all their lives. There is no support available to them. We asked, as part of presenting the legal case to the judge, how many properties they had tried to go after on daft.ieand elsewhere since all this began. They estimate approximately 700 properties, with 300 of them before Christmas. They are desperately looking for places. Look at what is around them. Last week, just before going to court, they tried the new apartments on the N11. The rent is €2,700 a month. This case involves a worker in a semi-State company who gets approximately €50,000. The family can afford to pay €1,000, perhaps €1,200 and at a push they could maybe pay €1,500. They cannot pay €2,700. They are entitled to nothing from the State through the housing assistance payment or eligibility for social housing. What are they supposed to do? We keep asking these questions of the Government and the Minister just walks out and we get no answers.

The Taoiseach does not understand and neither does the Tánaiste. When I raised this case with the Tánaiste a week or two ago, he said they could not possibly be in court to be evicted because there is an eviction ban. He does not even understand his own eviction ban. The eviction ban only covers people who got notices to quit after the introduction of the legislation. If they were overholding before that, they could be evicted.

People were being evicted. God knows, if we did not have the moratorium, we would be in a diabolical state now and we are going to be in a diabolical state by the middle of this year but, still, the Government are humming and hawing, and saying “We cannot do this and we cannot do that.” Can they not just have a simple policy of saying “We are going to have a policy of doing everything we can to stop people ending up homeless”?

Another case I was dealing with this week is that of a woman who is in a refuge for domestic violence. She is being evicted from a refuge after five months because that is all people are apparently allowed to stay in this refuge. After suffering domestic violence and getting to a refuge, she is now going to be evicted into homelessness. This is the shit that is going on here. Does the Government understand how bad it is and how much people are suffering? Yet, they still will not take emergency measures because they are humming and hawing and saying “The Attorney General may say this”, and all the rest of it. Let the Attorney General say it after we put the legislation forward and start to act to prevent people going into homelessness, and deal with the scandal of the empty properties and so on. If somebody wants to take it to court, let us test it in court, but let us do what is right, which is stop people ending up in these appalling situations. Let us stop the scandal, which all the figures show, of land speculators sitting on tens of thousands of planning permissions and doing absolutely nothing with them because they are just watching their investment clock up, making money by flipping property.

The Government allows this to happen and then the Minister just walks out because he does not really care about the suffering. That is the only conclusion you can draw.

See this speech in context