Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, Solidarity) | Oireachtas source

On the North Circular Road there is a building with 16 families living in apartments. Many young children are living there, looking forward to Santa coming, but before Christmas all those families have been issued with notices to quit. The landlord is not a small accidental landlord but a businessman with multiple properties. Yesterday, he told the tenants they were great tenants but said the market dictates the rent. The ground for eviction is the supposed need for substantial refurbishment. In reality, the tenants and the landlord know - I presume everyone here knows this and has seen it happen time and again - that this is yet another renoviction, something that deserves a word for itself now because it is so widespread, with the need for refurbishment used as a pretext to kick out tenants and hike up rents.

If these tenants are evicted, they will mostly be evicted into homelessness. The Dublin Renters' Union and Solidarity have been assisting them in preparing to oppose any evictions. The Anti-Evictions Bill, which we will debate tonight and vote on tomorrow, would stop evictions like this taking place. Every Deputy will have a choice to take the side of landlords like that or take the side of the tenants. The vast majority of homelessness is being caused by evictions from the private rented sector and that is just the sharpest end of the conditions that face tenants.

Since the Government took office, rents in cities have increased by more than 30%. Average rent nationally is more than €1,300 a month and when combined with low pay and precarity, one in seven tenants now faces consistent poverty. The picture, unfortunately, was similar two years ago in January 2017 when we moved our previous Anti-Evictions Bill. That Bill was defeated by the casting vote of the Ceann Comhairle. It would have been passed were it not for the votes of the many landlords in this Dáil who voted against it. If it had been implemented then, 2,000 families who faced eviction in 2017 on the grounds of sale of property would have been protected.

The Taoiseach's Government voted against that Bill. Two years on, with landlords continuing to use grounds of sale and renovation to evict tenants, will the Government vote against an anti-evictions Bill again? Will Fianna Fáil sit on the fence and abstain again? At the very least, does the Taoiseach agree that the one in four Deputies who are landlords should recuse themselves from voting on this Bill because of a clear conflict of interest? That conflict of interest goes much deeper, of course, than their personal status as landlords. It is related to the commitment of the establishment parties to the capitalist system and the free market in housing, which allows landlords to profit massively from a crisis facing tenants and others. It means that tenants such as those on the North Circular Road and all those affected by the housing crisis have no choice but to organise for a ban on evictions, proper rent controls and the building of public and genuinely affordable housing.

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