Joan Collins (Dublin South Central, Independents 4 Change) | Oireachtas source

I apologise, as I was late coming in so I do not know if the issue I am going to raise has been covered already. I heard reference to the HAP payment and top-ups. I came in halfway through Deputy Ó Cuív's contribution.

I thank the organisations for coming in this morning and giving their expert advice on what needs to be done to prevent poverty as much as possible or to help people to get out of the poverty trap. The pandemic has very clearly exposed the underbelly of society and as a committee we have a big role to play in trying to deal with the issue. I wish to raise two issues.

Recently, a young woman contacted me who is in receipt of a homeless HAP payment. She came from homelessness. She is on the €990 homeless HAP limit. The landlord recently wrote to her to say there will be a 4% increase on her rent. That legislation was brought in by the Government to allow landlords to increase rent in rent pressure zones. She says she cannot afford it and that she can see herself being homeless again. She was told she can negotiate the top-up with her landlord or else go back to the normal HAP because the difficulty is that on the homeless HAP, one cannot transfer. Have the witnesses come across similar situations? When I spoke to people in the homeless HAP section, they said they are seeing it coming through, in particular people on the PUP are having difficulty paying the rent increases. I was trying to figure out how we could deal with that. I do not like to put money into landlords' pockets, but should we argue that if there is a 4% increase in rent, there should be a 4% increase on the HAP to counteract it? I know that would impact on the 15% differential rent contribution the tenant has to pay but it would be less than the 4%. I am trying to figure out in my own head how we should approach that because I think it might become more of an issue. Obviously rent caps would be much better.

When the bin charge came in initially I was talking to a man who has a child with severe autism and he made the point that there should be a link between public health and the family because most people who are advised to get incontinence pads have a link with a GP or hospital and in that way we could get them signed up to have their bins collected. A lot of these pads should be going for incineration rather than being mixed in with general waste. He suggested that there should be a special collection of such waste. That would probably stigmatise people because they would have to have a separate coloured bin, for example, but we have to find some way that we can get money to people with an extra burden such as incontinence pads. I again thank the witnesses for coming. I really appreciate it.