Ruairi Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

What I am about to say has all been said. It is straightforward. The Bill will fail to do what our Bill would have done, that is, to protect families, as my party colleague, Deputy Ward, stated. We needed an extension of the legislation as it existed. We needed to ensure there was a moratorium on all rent increases and that there would be no evictions, but we do not have that.

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We have a really complicated process whereby people who may have lost income have to make contact with their landlord and the Residential Tenancies Board. This requires a certain skill set and it would be difficult for certain individuals to do. We are talking about people who may have disabilities or mental health issues. I do not think I am going off on too great a tangent in pointing out that, once again, we are seeing a composite of many failed services where they all meet together. We are seeing the consequences of not having the mental health services, the residential beds and other services that are required in communities. Those services are consistently and constantly reliant on NGOs, sometimes even when Government funding is going to them, to bridge the gaps that exist across the board.

The whole housing crisis comes down to the fact that we have failed to build a sufficient supply of housing. I cannot help but think that previous Governments - the last Government in particular - thought at some point that they could just hold up the housing system and deal with it in the same way they dealt with the health service. People would get the idea that dealing with health is a very difficult issue and it is not really possible to resolve it, but eventually we would get it all worked out. That is what I believe happened in regard to housing. The view was that the private system would kick into action at a certain point in time, the market would rectify everything and supply would meet demand. That has not happened over many years and we have absolutely failed to address it.

I spoke last week in the Chamber about the fact there are 5,700 people on Louth County Council's housing list. I noted that the number would probably be much higher except that income thresholds are very low and a huge number of people fall between stools. The local authority in County Louth is consistently and constantly under pressure, even in respect of turning around re-lets and refurbishing its existing stock. A lot of this is down to the requirement to service the cost associated with the council's land banks, which cost some €1 million last year. The council is currently considering proposals to increase the local property tax but that would raise an amount only sufficient to service the land banks it bought under instruction from previous Governments, including at the height of the Celtic tiger boom. Some of those land banks are huge. If this debt issue could be dealt with and if we had an imaginative approach to dealing with it from both the local authorities and from Departments - I am aware of a request for a meeting to discuss the matter - a real solution could be found in respect not only of social housing but also affordable housing and affordable cost rentals. If we are to deal with this issue, that is where we have to get to.

The first thing we need is a three-year moratorium or ban on rent increases, as proposed by Sinn Féin in the Bill we put forward last week. Our view on this will not be news to anybody. It has been Sinn Féin policy for many years, as espoused by our spokesperson, Deputy Ó Broin. A moratorium is an absolute necessity and it is accepted as such by a huge number of people in our society. Alongside that, we must seek to reform the whole rental situation. I note that Threshold has spoken about how eventually, a complete ban on so-called renevictions will be needed, that is, where landlords claim they are either renovating or renting out to a family member for the purpose of getting rid of an existing tenant, who may then lapse into homelessness. Threshold has proposed that the quid pro quofor outlawing that practice would be the introduction of added protections for landlords which would, in effect, professionalise the entire sector. In fairness, private landlords will claim they are at some degree of disadvantage versus the large hedge funds and so on that have bought huge numbers of apartments and houses and are able to make huge profits and operate on the basis of only paying corporate tax rates. We need to deal with those issues.

Several speakers have referred to the need for local authority-led housing builds, particularly in the case of social housing. We really need the Department to kick into play and give councils the capacity and resources required to do that. Otherwise, everything we are hearing is empty talk. There have been a number of successful social housing projects in recent times. The Housing First initiative has enabled local authorities to provide protections to what we would term vulnerable tenants, who need an extra level of care and security. Doing so provides several benefits. It is of benefit to the whole community when housing is found for a person who may previously have caused problems in terms of how they reacted with the rest of the community. Accommodating people in such circumstances also protects the local authority because it helps to avoid some of the situations that would have arisen, whether by people not taking care or sometimes through taking bad choices, which led to the destruction of local authority property.

Louth County Council has led the way in this regard and I would like to see the Housing First approach expanded and further resourced. I am very happy to note that there is going to be a new family-orientated Housing First initiative. I would like to know how quickly it will happen, because it is an absolute necessity. We need to protect tenants and their rights and ensure we do not increase the numbers of people falling into homelessness. We also need to protect communities from anti-social and anti-community behaviour. An awful lot of the cases local authorities are dealing with involve families who may have multiple issues and problems with which the State has failed to assist them. We leave it to their neighbours and other people who live in their community to deal with the outworkings of those problems. We urgently need a heavily resourced, family-orientated Housing First initiative that will enable the local authority to deal with families and to engage with other services, whether Tusla, mental health services, the HSE or any other services that are required, to find a solution. A harm-reduction approach is required that will benefit not only the family in question but also the wider community.

I have no doubt that a lot of the elected representatives in this Chamber, particularly those who previously worked as city and county councillors, have dealt with all of these issues in their own localities. The really sad thing is that the local authorities were producing the same lists, detailing the same problems and, in some cases, the very same families, two, three or even 20 years ago. We have absolutely failed to deal with those problems and have instead left it to communities to deal with the outworkings. I do not want to be seen to be overly critical of local authorities. First and foremost, some of these issues relate to other State services. We need to have somebody who takes the lead in these matters and requisitions the required services from the relevant bodies, whether the HSE, Tusla or even schools. This type of whole-of-service solution is absolutely required and it must happen before we can deal with the wider issue of the criminal actions that are occurring in some privately owned homes, privately rented homes and council houses. Some of these cases relate directly to vulnerable people being put under pressure by nefarious and organised characters who are able to skirt around the edge of the law and will always have two or three people between them and the actual criminal act.

We need to update all our laws and services and I would like to see a whole-of-government response to this. When I refer to crime, I am specifically talking about the drugs epidemic with which we are dealing and the violence that goes with it. It is happening in Drogheda, my town of Dundalk and in every village and town across this State, and it all needs to be dealt with.

That said, we are here to talk about this legislation. I welcome the limited protections in the Bill, but they are too cumbersome for the people to whom they apply. We have failed to deal with people who have now built up arrears. We need to consider a 100% moratorium because we all know the RPZs are not preventing rent increases and we need to make it as difficult as possible for people to fall into homelessness. We are currently putting pressure on local authorities to spend a significant amount getting people into inadequate emergency accommodation and we are not necessarily putting the money where it needs to be. We are just wasting it.

HAP, which was meant to be a short-term solution, has become the baseline for rents. While we are all very glad of it as it gets people into necessary housing, it is the reason there are houses for rent in some local authority housing estates in Dundalk for upwards of €1,400. That is incredibly difficult for a family that cannot access HAP. Not only is such a family up against people who can access HAP, though I am not taking away from its necessity, given the housing crisis we are in, it is also up against several young people who may be working in the likes of PayPal or some of the foreign direct investment, FDI, firms around Dundalk. We are very glad to have those companies, but the people working in them have much more spending power than a regular family. We need to ensure we can provide families with the supports and protections they need. Unfortunately, this is another failure of the Government to take the required action.

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