Séamus Healy (Tipperary, Workers and Unemployed Action Group) | Oireachtas source

The policy of reliance on the market has created a housing emergency. The market has failed and failed disastrously. The result is 91,000 families on local authority housing waiting lists and 21,000 families on housing assistance payments, all of which are living from hand to mouth and have not got a ha'penny left at the end of the week. Thousands are homeless, including 2,700 children living in various forms of homeless accommodation, and we have the unseen homeless, the thousands of people who are couch-surfing or doubling up with friends or relatives. There are 76,000 mortgages in arrears, 30,000 of which have been in arrears for two years or more. The people in those cases got mortgages and fell into arrears through no fault of their own when they lost their job due to the recession. They were cajoled into getting mortgages by the whole system, including the newspapers whose property supplements told them they had to get their foot on the housing ladder. Now they find themselves in very serious financial difficulties.

The first thing the Government and this country should do is stop making the position worse.

What I mean by that is they should stop adding to the problem. The Government owns Allied Irish Banks and Permanent TSB and should immediately instruct those banks to stop repossessions and evictions. No legislation is needed for this; all that is needed is a simple phone call from the Minister for Finance to tell these two banks which we own to stop evictions and repossessions.

This would be a good start but we really need the declaration of a housing emergency in law. Clause (a) of the Government's amendment, suggesting that the Bill might be unconstitutional, is to my mind disingenuous. The previous Government introduced financial emergency measures in the public interest, FEMPI, legislation and this Government extended it only a few weeks ago. The FEMPI legislation interferes with property rights, and there is a provision in the Constitution which allows interference with property rights in emergency circumstances such as those we have now. Public service pensions were cut and as those pensions have been noted and adjudicated on by the courts to be property rights, the Government has already interfered with property rights. It can do so again and should do so immediately. The declaration of such an emergency would ensure that the other banks could be stopped from repossessing and evicting people who, through no fault of their own, are in financial difficulties.

I will briefly outline other measures that could be taken. The Government could instruct the banks to operate the mortgage-to-rent scheme. The banks are still vetoing this scheme in a disgraceful fashion and that must be stopped. We must also repeal the shameful provisions in recent legislation that enable vulture funds to evict sitting tenants if they can get 20% more in a sale price because of vacant possession.

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