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

I will start by referring to what the Taoiseach stated earlier and the use of the term "extreme". This has become a familiar trope of the Taoiseach when referring to the socialist left and our policies. It is part of a wider, quite worrying, narrative that is taking hold in the mainstream political establishment across Europe, which says there are extremists on the right and extremists on the left and then the nice, sensible, pragmatic centre. An issue such as this tests that narrative in a concrete way and refutes it in the strongest terms.

For Elaine, who I have mentioned here previously but whose case is still on my desk, the situation is extreme. It is now past the date when she must leave her house. The landlord is evicting her and her four children on the ground of sale. She is now overholding. Although she did not have legal grounds to appeal she appealed just to delay the process because she had nowhere to go. Now, days before Christmas, she is faced with having to overhold or put herself and her four children into homelessness. It is worth pointing out what homelessness will mean for Elaine. She has been pleading with the local authority and the various agencies and bodies to try to find a solution. She does not want to overhold or to be in a confrontation with her landlord, who has told her he is going to the District Court to take out a summons to evict her.

In 2021, we will move away from an over-reliance on HAP - I accept there is an over-reliance - to having people accommodated in the stock of social housing. That is right and it is part of our Rebuilding Ireland plan.

The Government opposes the Bill. We support a number of measures in it and are progressing them. Other measures go too far and the Taoiseach was right to say that they are too extreme. Our rental market is not like that of other European countries yet. It is true that we do not have a mature rental sector. We are trying to reform it to make it into one, but we are doing so in a time of under-supply, which makes it more challenging. We do not have a cost rental market. In other countries, it is at 20% to 25%, but we are trying to build one. We do not have an independent regulator for tenants and landlords but we are trying to turn the RTB into one at the moment. We do not have enough supply and we do not have the professional landlord sector that they have in other European countries because they are more mature. We are losing landlords. It is a fact we cannot run away from. The majority of our landlords, 85%, own only one or two properties. I refer to an elderly couple making a small investment, someone perhaps inheriting a property that they did not think they would inherit, or people who never intended to own a second property. Some became accidental landlords through the crash because their family became larger and they wanted to move on. It is wrong to demonise these people, because they are providing homes to others whether they meant to or not. Buy-to-lets are being sold today and they are not being bought by other landlords. We are losing landlords and rental homes. We have to take that very seriously. Any new measure that comes into this House needs to be weighed against the risk of losing landlords and making things worse for people who are in the rental sector.

Unfortunately, there are always going to be grounds for evictions. Even people in the voluntary sector will tell us that. Evictions are not the main source for people entering into emergency accommodation and language here does matter. Deputy Boyd Barrett held up a newspaper advertisement recently of loans that had been owned by NAMA and that have now been sold. He called it public housing but it is not public housing. Language matters.

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