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

It is remarkable news that the Cabinet committee on housing did not meet in advance of the significant and hugely retrograde decision, made in the Bill now passing through the Dáil, to open the door for a resumption of evictions into homelessness in the middle of a pandemic. I find that extraordinary. I do not know if the Government does not understand or, worse, does understand the implications of the Bill now going through the Dáil. Let us be clear, however, that it removes most of the emergency protections that were put in place to prevent people being made homeless and evicted because there is a public health emergency. That public health emergency still exists and people made homeless now will have their health imperilled as a result of the pandemic, and the Government will be responsible. Yet, that issue has not even been discussed at the Cabinet housing committee. That is an extraordinary admission from the Taoiseach.

I ask the Government, even at this stage, to pull back from that decision because the number of people presenting for homeless services has dropped dramatically as a result of the ban on evictions. By the way, when People Before Profit put forward a Bill to ban evictions in the previous Dáil, the Fianna Fáil party supported it. I do not understand why that party is now supporting a plan to lift that ban on evictions into homelessness in the midst of a pandemic, when it is really unthinkable to put people on the street, into shared accommodation where they are more vulnerable to the virus, or into overcrowded conditions, where they are also vulnerable to the virus.

I will quickly ask about one other issue. Walking about Dublin city during the pandemic, I met an elderly woman from the south inner city. She asked me to go and take a look off Aungier Street, where a row of beautiful old buildings is run-down and empty. That elderly woman said the situation was shocking because people in her area, including her children and grandchildren, needed to be housed, yet some landlord was sitting on those empty buildings. That story is repeated in towns, villages and cities across the country, where landlords, property owners and vulture funds sit on empty properties that could be used to house people. That is really taunting the people on the housing waiting lists and nothing is being done about it.

Does the Taoiseach have any plans to go on an aggressive campaign of getting hold of hoarded land and empty properties that could be used to house people impacted by homelessness and, more generally, to address the lack of social and affordable housing by getting that property into use in respect of the dire housing crisis?

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