Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

Last night at 10 p.m., I submitted an amendment to go on the clár today but I was immediately told it was too late. I knew it was too late because at 7.30 p.m. I received an email telling me that I had to have the amendments in by 9 p.m. At 7.30 p.m. I was here embroiled in the debate on the mother and baby homes.

I made a complaint to the Ceann Comhairle this morning about this. I was told that the Business Committee agreed on 9 p.m. the evening before as the deadline. I cannot corroborate that. However, I know the staff are very busy but it would not have killed somebody to send an email when that agreement had been made on the deadline instead of at 7.30 p.m. last night, effectively giving an hour and a half notice for amendments.

I want to read the amendment I would have submitted into the record. It was in fact copied and pasted from the amendment that we achieved to get into the last emergency measures in the public interest when we passed them back in March. The amendment basically covered all proposed evictions in tenancies in the State. For the avoidance of doubt, it included local authority and approved housing bodies. It stated all Travellers currently resident in any location should not, during the crisis, be evicted from that location except where movement is required to ameliorate hardship. There is much hardship among the Traveller community. The Irish Traveller Movement wrote to the Minister recently and made a well-argued and well-thought out plea to him to put a ban on evictions of any Travellers for the duration of the crisis.

In fact in the past few weeks there has been a significant rise of Covid infection in the Traveller community. Will the Minister give the same degree of protection from eviction afforded to Travellers in the last eviction ban? I support the amendment to increase it to six months. Even as it stands, will the non-eviction of Travellers apply whatever the duration is?

It is important because this is an extremely vulnerable group. The sort of chronic diseases Travellers are at risk of arise mostly from the conditions in which they live. Their living conditions are often damp and cold and lack proper sanitation and water facilities with no ability to heat them. The homes leave much to be desired for hundreds of families. More than 3,000 children are living in inadequate conditions. Many of these conditions are the ones that Covid goes after. Their vulnerability involves chronic lung diseases, pulmonary diseases, heart conditions, cystic fibrosis and asthma. That is what Covid loves to go after. Many children and adults living in Traveller accommodation are susceptible to these problems.

There is a significant level of homelessness among the Traveller community. As a proportion of the entire population, it is over-represented in this regard. The Minister knows up to 10% of all homelessness is made up by the Traveller community. That Travellers will not be evicted for the period designated must be on the Minister's radar.

I am raging I was not allowed put my amendment. It is grossly unfair, not just to the Travellers but to all those vulnerable groups we were setting out to protect. Local authorities have sadly and badly let down the Traveller community. In July, the Irish Traveller Movement revealed that, nationally, 30% of Travellers are currently in need of accommodation and yet eight local authorities have set targets well below the need identified in their five-year Traveller accommodation programmes. There is a history of this. We know it because there was significant publicity around it during the last Traveller accommodation programme plan where we saw a pattern of every local authority not drawing down the spending allocated to them for Traveller accommodation needs.

We have to redress this. We must ensure Travellers are not evicted during this pandemic, despite the awful conditions in which they live. It is not good enough just to extend this for the period of level 5. The Government has admitted we are not going to come out of level 5 and have no Covid. I have heard on radio programmes and other interviews over the past week the expression "ebb and flow" used by many Ministers. It is ebb and flow not zero virus or crushing or breaking the virus. If that is the Government's strategy, then it needs to ebb and flow some decency in the direction of the most vulnerable. Among them, I give a shout out for the Traveller community. They need to be protected too.

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