Dessie Ellis (Dublin North West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I acknowledge the Minister of State's intention in this legislation of moving towards a fairer system with more consistency across the board in terms of rents. Action must be taken as a matter of urgency to bring rents into line across the country. The Minister of State seems to be working towards that objective, but the pace of progress is too slow. There are massive differences in rents across the country and that will continue when the rent supplement scheme transfers to local authorities. County and city councils are already coming under huge pressure to cope with the demand for properties under the rental accommodation scheme. Large numbers are not being housed because there is no social housing available. We had an incident in Bray in which residents were locked into the local authority premises because of a failure to provide housing under the rental accommodation scheme. That type of thing will happen more and more in the future. The commitment given under RAS was that people would either be given local authority housing or a continuation of RAS. I have spoken to a person who ended up homeless as a consequence of the local authority's failure to fulfil that obligation.

How is it proposed that the rent supplement scheme will be administered when it is taken over by the local authorities? How, for instance, will we deal with situations in which a property is put up for sale by a landlord or lending institution and the RAS tenant is evicted? The rules are too lax in this regard, with many contracts being cut short because the landlord wants to sell. We must tighten up the provisions in regard to these contracts because the current situation is very unfair.

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