Brian Stanley (Laois-Offaly, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I am referring to the day of the meeting about housing. A total of 91 households presented as homeless in the first 90 days of the council this year. Laois has a relatively small council. I had four people in my office last week who were experiencing different types of homelessness. Two came in on the Monday. They are going to add to the numbers because of the hangover of bills, the confusion and the lack of evidence available to a tenant to show he has paid it.

The Minister is missing another point. Many landlords have put in prepaid meters. It is not a bad system. A tenant can go to a local pay point in a local shop and get €10 or €20 worth of credit and put that credit into the gas or electricity meter, just as a person does with a mobile telephone. When it runs out, the person can go over by €10. That is useful. It is a good help for people. The most a landlord is ever left with is a €10 hangover of the bill. There is no great dispute and world war three does not open up over it. The problem in this case is those involved do not have the means to read the meter. Uisce Éireann will not dispatch meter readings here, there and yonder for the benefit of landlords. I realise there is electronic means of reading them but the company is not going to do it and it is not easy to contact.

The operation has been taken away from the local authorities. When the local authorities ran the call centres, it was easy. A person could ring up the local authority and ask for the water services section. The man or woman at the other end of the telephone would know where the person was living and could identify the area. The person contacted by the call centre person in turn would know this information as well. This is different territory and I see difficulties arising with it already. I hear councillors talking about it, even councillors from the Minister's party. It is not as easy now as it was previously. This situation will create another muddle. In the middle of that muddle will be the casualties, the private rental tenants stuck in revolving door tenancies. These people are moved on in a matter of a few months because landlords do not want people staying in tenancies for long given the nature of tenancy and rent legislation. The Minister has not brought in rent caps. He has talked about it again lately and we are getting near election time.

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