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

While this is primarily about the climate transition we need to make, given that the Minister of State is here, I want to raise one urgent issue. It would be good to get his response to it.

Threshold is the latest group today to appeal to the Government to extend the eviction ban for a number of months. I argue it should be extended for the foreseeable future. Some of us have been saying the eviction ban should remain in place until we address the housing emergency. Will the Minister of State say anything about not allowing that eviction ban to expire at the end of this month? As Threshold pointed out, a point which many of us have made over the past number of weeks, people on reduced incomes or who have lost their jobs have built up rent arrears. Others affected include those on housing assistance payment who might have not been able to manage top-up payments or those who are just being threatened by vulture funds with eviction for spurious reasons because the Government failed to close loopholes which allow them to do this.

For all of those reasons, and after everything people have gone through, we do not need a slew of evictions coming down the track after the eviction ban is lifted at the end of this month. The Government should give that certainty in order that people do not stumble from one extremely difficult situation in terms of a public health emergency into another one, that of facing eviction.

I will mention an example that I have cited here before of how nothing really happens. The Government was accusing other people of spin. I was not joking when I said the party's real title should be "Spin Gael". For the past three years, I have raised the case of one block of apartments in Dún Laoghaire where there have been four successive attempts by vulture funds to evict people on spurious grounds.

Half of that block has been sitting empty for two years because the landlord sees it as more beneficial for its agenda to leave apartments sitting empty while people desperately need them. People are facing eviction if the Minister of State does not extend that no-eviction clause immediately. Their case is with the Residential Tenancies Board. It has happened through no fault of their own and there are many like them. The Minister of State should step in and stop those evictions. In my mind, he should take over that whole block using a compulsory purchase order in order that those people are safe and the ten units that have been sitting there, outrageously empty, for two years could be used by desperate people on the housing list.

As a by-the-way response to the Minister of State's comments about the Government's success with housing, the facts are pretty awful. The latest figures in Rebuilding Ireland about housing directly built by local authorities show that the Government built less in 2019 than in 2018. Local authority housing output is getting worse. The State built 1,238 houses in 2018 and only 1,088 in 2019, but in Dublin the situation is worse. In 2018, the four Dublin counties built 634 council houses, a pathetic number in and of itself. In 2019, that fell to 228. In Dún Laoghaire, the number went from 120 in 2018, for a housing list of 5,000, to 17 in 2019 for that housing list. I will tell the Minister of State a little secret: fewer than 17 will be built next year. It is getting worse, not better. This is relevant to whether we can take seriously the Government talk about doing something about the climate emergency and about a 7% annual emissions reduction target. The Government produces plans and there are many promises and a lot of spin, but we do not see the delivery, as is the case with local authority housing. I do not see how the Green Party can imagine for one second that it will get a 7% annual emissions reduction with the approach the Government has, which is not serious at any level. I will not list everything, although there are such facts as the Government wanting to expand the herd, to continue with the liquefied natural gas plant, to kowtow to the fossil fuel industry about the fossil fuel ban and so on.

In the area of housing, it is blatantly obvious that the market cannot deliver. If there is one thing that the Government should have learned from the pandemic, since it was forced to learn this, it is that when the market has to shut down and the State intervenes, it is capable of doing so. The Government does not pass off responsibility but does it itself. That is what is needed if we are to retrofit the housing stock in this country. The State has to do it by establishing a State construction company, marshalling the resources and having a planned approach to at least 100,000 retrofits a year. Even though the Government says we are only the party of protest, we have, along with the Government in fairness, though ours is much more ambitious, gone to the trouble of having a costed retrofit programme for the next ten years in our manifesto. It is expensive but it will save us significant fines and emissions, and it will improve the quality of housing for hundreds of thousands of our citizens who are, in many cases, in chronically damp, poorly insulated homes where their quality of life suffers as a result. It does not surprise me that we have such high asthma rates in this country when one considers that 86% of people live in houses that have a building energy rating of C or worse. Most are much worse than that.

We are not even touching the problem because we are essentially leaving it to the market, rather than the State doing it. Now is the time to change approach because there are sadly now hundreds of thousands of young people without jobs, possibly for the foreseeable future.

If we really went out to recruit apprentices and tradespeople to a State construction company where they were paid decently and were guaranteed that they would have security of employment, the Government would actually get them into the construction sector to retrofit the houses at the scale we need to do. The State, however, would have to give that certainty to people. Why does the Minister of State think half the people that were in construction ten years ago left? It was because the boom slump caused by the private market dumped them on the scrapheap, and they said "I am never going back to construction". That is what happens in this industry because of the way the Government ran it.

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