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

The programme for Government commits to addressing the ongoing and shameful homelessness crisis.

The Green Party and Fianna Fáil when in opposition supported our Bill to halt evictions. In the context of Covid-19 the Government was forced, rightly, to bring in an eviction ban because making people homeless is totally incompatible with public health, yet the Government has now allowed that ban to lapse.

We sought to bring forward a Bill in our Private Members' slot next week which is essentially the eviction ban, but we have been told that staff in the Dáil, through no fault of their own I want to stress, cannot process it because they have been overrun with things such as the Forestry (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill, which the Government rammed through with a guillotine, collapsing the normal sequence of legislative scrutiny. The Government has done this on multiple occasions, and as a result the staff are not able to process our Bill for Private Members' time. The Bill would seek to reinstate the eviction ban to prevent people going into homelessness during Covid-19.

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