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

I welcome the opportunity to speak on the Anti-Evictions Bill 2018. I commend Solidarity-People Before Profit on bringing it forward and confirm my support for it. This is one of a number of Bills and numerous Private Members' motions that have been before the House in recent years. Hardly a week has gone by in the past two and a half years without some housing issue being on the agenda. The Government is completely out of touch with the situation on the ground. It is supported by Fianna Fáil, which is also completely out of touch. Both the Government and Fianna Fáil are effectively supporting an emergency housing crisis. We all know that is the case.

The Government policy and that of Fianna Fáil has been a disastrous failure. The policy has been to privatise local authority housing in the first instance. That started back in the early 2000s with Fianna Fáil. I remember well when it was announced at a housing meeting when I was a member of South Tipperary County Council. Since then, many of us said that it would be a disaster, that it would not work and that the private sector would never deliver the houses that were needed. Sadly, we have the proof of the pudding now that more than 10,000 people, including 4,000 children, are homeless. The situation is disastrous for thousands of families. Fr. McVerry has said this crisis is affecting 500,000 people.

This Government and previous Administrations have produced a housing policy that is, in effect, relying on the private sector. It is relying on vulture funds, developers and landlords. That policy has failed and it has created the current emergency. The Government should listen to independent academics and to organisations involved in the housing area. Each and every one of them has said that the private rented sector is a complete and absolute disaster and that it is driving homelessness. We know that more than 50% of families who become homeless do so directly from the private rented sector. Only recently, Professor Tony Fahey from the school of social policy at UCD said exactly that.

In fact, he said that, 100 years after the Land League, when fair rent and fixity of tenure was the big issue, this issue is now back on the agenda today in the private rental sector for thousands of families who are forced to rent privately and either pay landlords directly or through the HAP scheme. Professor Fahey said 30% of families are going to suffer a lifetime of substantial rents as tenants. Professor Eoin O'Sullivan said more than 50% of families becoming homeless come from the private rented sector. He also said that unless the right to terminate tenancies, that is, the right to evict people, is stopped, the flow into homelessness will continue. Niamh Randall of Simon said there can be no effective rent control while evictions from private rented dwellings continue.

I welcome this Bill. I raised many of these issues on another Bill some weeks ago. There is no doubt this Bill is essential if anything is to be done. It will not solve the housing problem, and its movers do not suggest it will. What it will do is stop the situation getting worse. The situation is getting worse, irrespective of what the Minister of State will tell us. We know exactly what he will tell us because he told us the same thing a fortnight ago, a fortnight before that and a month before that, and for the past two and a half years, namely, Government policy is working. However, Government policy is not working. Anybody who has any bit of common sense or any bit of grey matter between their ears, or anybody who is affected by the housing crisis, knows the policy is not working and that it has to change.

The issues raised in this Bill regarding evictions and the sale of properties with vacant possession are essential matters to deal with if the situation is not to worsen. This Bill will only deal with those areas and it will mean the situation will not get worse. We need a major emergency programme of building of public housing on public land by local authorities if the housing crisis is to be tackled successfully. However, the Government has turned its face against this. It continues to rely on landlords, vulture funds and developers, rather than looking towards the local authorities and the building of large numbers of public houses on public land. I support the Bill and I commend those who moved it.

See this speech in context