Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I thank Sinn Féin for tabling the motion and the "Prime Time Investigates" team for highlighting the issue. The landlords who exploited and profited from the conditions that we saw on "Prime Time Investigates" are just animals. They are flipping animals and they should be in prison. Nothing like that should be tolerated. They are the lowest of the low. What is scandalous is not just those extreme cases but the scale of non-compliance with regulations in the private rented sector. It is shocking. In a number of counties including Kilkenny, Louth, Offaly and Limerick, the non-compliance rate was 100%. In other counties the rate was in the high 90%, including in south Dublin, and in the high 80% in places like Galway, Meath and Clare. This is a shocking level of non-compliance with standards. While not all may be as bad as the horrific conditions that we saw on television, this is not a question of a few bad apples. This is chronic and endemic.

Someone said that it is a pity that it had to take a "Prime Time Investigates" programme to wake us up and that is certainly true. I remember coming into this House in 2012. I was a year in the Dáil at the time and was doing Leaders' Questions with the then Tánaiste, Eamon Gilmore. I said that we were on our way to a return to tenement conditions. The current Taoiseach, Deputy Varadkar, was giving out on television yesterday about the left and Sinn Féin heckling people but I certainly got heckled that day. There were hoots of derision from across the Fine Gael benches. Deputies said that I must be joking, that I was over-dramatising things. I referred to Seán O'Casey and tenement conditions and said that we were on the way back and there was laughter from across the Fine Gael benches. The Ceann Comhairle at the time had to stop proceedings in order to try to shut the Fine Gael Deputies up, such was the level of heckling. I was warning back in 2012 that we were heading towards tenement conditions.

It has taken until now for an acknowledgement but it was predictable - it was all so predictable. On the famous supply and demand equation, if the Government does not provide council housing, if it does not have enough staff in the local authorities and is, in fact, slashing staff who are supposed to inspections, all of this was eminently predictable. Now, will we get the sort of radical action we need? I agree completely with the NCT-style proposal but we have to have the staff, which means hundreds of people being put into the local authorities to do the inspections.

Critically, however, there will always be underground slum landlords if there is a situation where there is not enough quality social housing that is affordable and provided by the State itself. Indeed, and it is for another debate, the State's own housing stock has big problems. We just had a finding against us from Europe under the European Social Chapter in regard to the conditions in local authority housing complexes where there is chronic damp. I know from my own local authority, where, when we tell staff there is chronic damp, and because they do not have the resources, they say people need to open the windows because ventilation is the problem. Ventilation is not the problem; it is the deplorable and unacceptable conditions. If that is happening in the public sector, God knows the shocking situation in the private sector.

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