Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, Socialist Party) | Oireachtas source

I will be brief. In his response to our amendments and why they cannot be accepted, the Minister of State effectively gave the game away with the line that it would interfere with the right to property and by property, one should read the right of landlords to maximise their profit, their rent, from their tenants and, fundamentally, to do what they like with their properties. That sums it up and the approach of the Government is precisely as Deputy Coppinger has described it, namely, this right comes before the right of people to a home. The point is the house, flat or whatever people are renting is not just abstractly the private property or investment property or whatever of a landlord large or small; fundamentally, it is someone's home. It is a person's roof over his or her head and is all he or she potentially has between having somewhere to live or being forced, like thousands of people, into couch surfing, living in a car or a van or into emergency homeless accommodation. That is what it is; it is the right of people to a home and, fundamentally, the inability or unwillingness of the Government to come up with legislation that significantly shifts the balance in favour of tenants as opposed to landlords, which actually constitutes rent control and not just this rent certainty that merely is certainty one's rent will rise every couple of years, and relates to the fact that it prioritises, as do most interpretations of the Constitution, the right of landlords to their private property over the right of people to a home. That fundamentally is the issue. It is entirely reasonable, as our amendments propose, to place an additional burden on landlords to prove that unless they sell the property, they would suffer an unreasonable financial hardship. This is entirely reasonable when compared with the hardship that will be faced by people who are forced to leave a home and potentially are forced into homelessness. It speaks volumes about the approach of the Government and all the establishment parties that they consider that kind of burden on a landlord to be unreasonable and to be an infringement of a landlord's rights.

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