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

I will be share time with Deputy Mick Barry. I will take five minutes and he will take four.

The eviction of people into homelessness was utterly unacceptable before the pandemic. Solidarity-People Before Profit put forward an anti-evictions Bill that was passed with a majority in the previous Dáil. If I am correct, Fianna Fáil voted for that Bill and, ultimately, that is the solution. We need to stop evictions into homelessness and remove any grounds for eviction that are not related to genuine fault on the part of the tenant. All of the loopholes, including sale and refurbishment of the home, that are being used by property owners and landlords, essentially to maximise the profit on the property they own at the expense of real human beings who need, and have a right to, roofs over their heads must be removed. That is a generality but it is the solution and we should get on with it.

That aside, allowing the eviction of people into homelessness over rent arrears, mortgage arrears or anything else is utterly incompatible with public health requirements during a pandemic. I do not think that the Minister needs to write to the Department of Health to get advice on this because it is self-evident. The Minister should say that, until we decide the bigger issue, as an absolute minimum nobody is going to be evicted into homelessness during the pandemic. As long as Covid-19 is around - and it looks, sadly, as if it will be around for at least a couple of years - nobody should be evicted. Let us say that, do it, and make sure that is the policy.

How on earth can putting people on the street be compatible with adhering to public health guidance in terms of preventing transmission of the virus? It cannot be done. Where are such people supposed to wash their hands? How is hygiene to be maintained when one does not have a bathroom or toilet? Similar worries apply if someone enters shared accommodation in a hostel or homeless hub where kitchen and bathroom facilities must be shared. It is incompatible with adherence to public health guidance during a pandemic for anybody to be homeless or in co-living or shared accommodation. We should recognise that and enact the policy that is necessary to comply with the obvious need to protect the health of the public.

As I have already mentioned, we must get rid of the unacceptable, spurious and largely profit-driven reasons for evicting people. The Minister probably heard me mention the case of St. Helen's Court in Dún Laoghaire during the previous Dáil, a saga that is continuing and sums up a lot of what we are facing. If the eviction ban is lifted, tenants who have for two years faced four different attempts by a vulture fund to evict them will be evicted. They will be homeless and knocking on the door of Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council which has nowhere to house them. We should not let them be evicted, nor should we allow vulture funds to behave in that way. They have no reasonable grounds for trying to evict these people other than wanting to maximise the value of that property and the profit that they can make out of it. That simply should not be allowed.

I spoke to representatives of Threshold today and they are also saying that the Government needs to proactively step in and buy rental blocks from vulture funds to keep people from being made homeless and bring them into social and affordable housing. I suggest we do that in the case of St. Helen's Court, as was done with the Leeside apartments in Cork and in other similar cases where those kinds of threats and behaviours by vulture funds persist. I encourage the Minister to do that. It will save money on HAP and all the rest of it.

See this speech in context