Mick Barry (Cork North Central, Solidarity) | Oireachtas source

Regarding the Minister's invitation to Deputy Coppinger to meet with him about the issue under discussion, we will be happy to meet him to discuss that. We will welcome the compiling of statistics. We will hold the Minister to that. However, we will want to discuss a lot more than that. We will want to discuss the steps the Minister plans to take to ensure that people in such a situation can safely speak out and that people have protections against landlords who would take advantage of this power imbalance. We will want to know if the Minister will support the Anti-Evictions Bill 2018 or other progressive anti-eviction legislation and bring in real rent controls so that tenants are in a less vulnerable situation.

Finally I refer to HAP. To be clear, we raised a specific case in the Dáil today. We have since been contacted by hundreds of people expressing support. Among those hundreds are some who have raised their own issues and told their own stories. There seems to be a trend of people raising issues that have affected them in dealing with HAP landlords. We will check those stories and talk to those people. Some of them are single parents, who are disproportionately affected by the housing crisis. They cannot find anywhere else to rent. They fear being homeless with their kids. They are particularly affected by this power imbalance. I put it to the Minister that the correct position for him to take was not to have a go at myself and my party, which has raised criticisms of HAP in the past, but to express concern if there is any possibility that this might be the situation and to state his intention to put measures in place to deal with it. I am giving him a second opportunity to do so now.