Clare Daly (Dublin North, Socialist Party) | Oireachtas source

The Minister's Department told me the dispute mechanism that the State established for landlords and tenants is not open for review. I will give a case study and the Minister may respond in her reply. It concerns two constituents in my area who purchased a starter home in 2005, which was never intended to be an investment property. However, when they got married and had a family, the house was inadequate for their needs and they moved. Given that they could not sell the house without being left with a huge debt, they rented it out in September 2012. Soon, the tenant started leaving them short of rent and, in October 2013, stopped all payment. The tenant refused to answer the phone or the door or deal with correspondence.

The owners contacted the PRTB, to which they had paid a registration fee and to which they had to pay €90 every time they changed. The PRTB told them it could take months before a hearing would happen. They served notice on the tenant to vacate the house in November, but the tenant did not move out and the new tenant who was lined up had to go elsewhere. Eventually, the owners got a hearing with the PRTB in February this year. The tenant did not attend and was given a notice to quit within 21 days. The tenant did not appeal and at the end of the 21 days another period of 28 days was put in place. These people had to chase the PRTB at every level, and the tenant is still in their house months later. Those people, who have a family and a mortgage to pay, cannot make ends meet. The fact that we are dealing with local authorities, which have powers, and are not addressing it is unbalanced.

I am not in favour of local authorities being able easily to evict people. It has not been the case previously and the Judiciary has made it very difficult for the very valid reason that there is a responsibility to house people and if the local authority evicts a person, it is not clear who will deal with the him or her. The focus of the Bill should be on avoiding the situation. An eviction should always be the last resort, be it for anti-social behaviour or otherwise. If the Government were trying to be constructive, we would be passing legislation to speed up the process of pre-let repairs and the archaic system of tendering which happens in local authorities in order to put people into houses rather than dealing with a piece of legislation to get them out.

One of the reasons for the difficulty local authorities have in addressing issues of anti-social behaviour is not that the legislation is weak, but that other supports are not provided. People with serious mental health problems who were supposed to be linked up with social workers have been placed in communities. While these people have a lot of other baggage, which is intrusive to their neighbours and is difficult for the local authorities' staff to deal with, the fault, in the main, is not with the local authority staff but the HSE or other agencies which failed to provide the necessary supports to those families, which gave rise to anti-social behaviour or other issues.

There have been problems with An Garda Síochána, as it has not in an efficient and timely manner furnished local authorities with information on tenants who may cause problems by dealing drugs, etc. It is a bit rich to speak about empowering local authorities to evict people when we preside over cases where local authority staff have been butchered, while the number of tasks they deal with have probably mushroomed. There are very hard-pressed council staff dealing with a multiplicity of estate management issues but because of the public sector recruitment embargo, there are not enough staff members to deal with them. Will this legislation mean families will be evicted, as we have not put in the resources to work at tenancy sustainment or keeping people in homes? That is really where the focus should be.

I am not in favour of a system of compulsory deductions from people's social welfare payments, which is a retrograde step akin to the draconian legislation introduced for the household charge, etc. It is a bad precedent. We should be assisting people rather than forcibly taking payments. The Minister of State and all the Deputies in this House who have knocked on doors in the past number of weeks know that families are coming to the door with mountains of bills in their hands, asking which bill they should not pay. That is a result of the austerity policies being implemented, so deducting money from social welfare payments is not a solution.

I understand why people want to buy local authority houses. The tenant purchase scheme is very popular as people put a life's work into their houses. In reality, this is selling what could be future council housing stock, and it would be far better for the Government to be proactive in dealing with this issue. People could live in a home, raise their children before perhaps downsizing to an appropriate dwelling when the children are grown. The stock could be left in the hands of the State for another family which wants to rear a family. We do not have a continuous path now and the tenant purchase scheme is not the way to go.

This is the wrong discussion at the wrong time. The problem which councils have in dealing with tenants arises largely because of a lack of resources, the public sector recruitment embargo, austerity measures and so on. Our time would be better served in considering how to keep people in their homes rather than removing them from the dwellings.

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