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

Sometimes tenants are unable to pay their rent for genuine reasons and those tenants should have protection if they have legitimate reasons for being unable to pay the rent. I will give the example of people who are currently topping up with HAP payments, of whom there are a lot, and it will become increasingly an issue. It seems to be semi-official policy now, because HAP limits are completely inadequate, that people are topping-up over and above what is provided by the HAP payment to meet the excessive rents that are being charged and that is unsustainable in many cases. Many of those people are going to get themselves into difficulty despite their best efforts.

Some of the top-ups are in excess of what would legally be allowed, for example, for the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection to deduct from somebody's social welfare payment. The top-ups are driving people into extreme poverty. Somebody should not be evicted for being poor as a result of a dysfunctional market and the failures of Government policy. This is a protection for people who genuinely cannot afford to pay, to prevent them being evicted.