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

Rent increases of 4% per year on top of already unaffordable rents are not doing much to control rents. They are completely out of control and beyond the vast majority of workers' ability to pay. The failure of all the measures the Taoiseach cited to address the threat of vulture funds trying to evict people is very evident in the case of St. Helen's Court, Dún Laoghaire, as I mentioned. Two different vulture funds - one flipped the property to the other - have attempted four times to try to evict the people living there. When they keep doing this it has an attrition effect and it is absolutely clear that the people behind these funds have no interest in having tenants. They have succeeded. In that block there are now ten empty units sitting there. The Government should instruct Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council to use compulsory purchase powers to take over those units. Otherwise, the vulture funds will eventually drive the tenants out, as they have already driven out ten. More to the point, the Government should close the loopholes in the law that allow these vulture funds to do this continually, but the Government is not doing so. The vulture funds find new loopholes because the Government still allows sale or refurbishment as grounds for attempted eviction. Another way around this is that they refurbish the property but change its fundamental character such that they cannot offer it back to the tenant because it is a different type of property. That is what they are doing.

I ask in the first instance that the Taoiseach gets the Minister to intervene to ensure that the local authorities-----

See this speech in context