Eugene Murphy (Roscommon-Galway, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I will make a brief contribution before leaving the rest of the time to my colleague, Deputy Brassil.

Deputy Michael Healy-Rae has left, but I found myself agreeing and disagreeing with him. He declared himself a major landlord. I am sure he is an excellent one, does his work very well and looks after his tenants. I would expect nothing else from him. To my mind, however, part of his presentation created an impression that we did not have any bad landlords. In reality, we have some. In my part of the country, they do not amount to a large percentage, but when one is called to a residence and sees leaking pipes, radiators that do not work and draughts here, there and everywhere. It amounts to unsuitable accommodation and is not something I would tolerate.

In fairness, many smaller landlords have one or two houses for a number of reasons, for example, family. The house might have once been the family home but now has no one in it. They do it up and rent it out. Some do not like to sell their old family homes and prefer to keep them. Most of these people do an excellent job and always look after their tenants.

While most tenants in my part of the country are good, I have come across cases of houses that have been wrecked and left in a deplorable state. They may have been good houses with proper heating and no shortcomings, yet people have left them in a terrible state. However, that is a minority situation.

There is no doubt that we need landlords in the system. We cannot function without them. My party was criticised regarding the introduction of a landlord's budget in October 2018. However, as I said, we need landlords in the system. Budget 2019 was not a landlord's budget. A rental market needs landlords if it is to work. It incentivises landlords to stay in the system. We should be reminded that 40,000 landlords left the system between 2012 and 2018, including 4,000 in the past 12 months. We need to keep landlords in the system or else there will be fewer units available, in which case we will have a further difficulty with rising rents.

In my constituency, there is a major problem involving tenants who are given notice to leave a house by their landlords and subsequently find when they are looking for a place to stay that they do not qualify for social housing under the housing assistance payment, HAP, scheme. People sometimes find their income is slightly above the threshold to qualify for a local authority house and they do not qualify for the HAP. The Minister will be aware of this problem, which needs to be addressed. It is the biggest problem I have in my constituency.

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