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

What I said in my contribution and previously was that it is a fact that the majority of people who come into my clinic because they are threatened with eviction are in that position because the landlord is selling. It is not a flood, but there is a constant flow of people of all ages into my clinic. As a result of the eviction ban which applied during the heavy lockdown the number of people entering homelessness declined. That is a fact. Logically, it followed that when the ban was lifted the number of cases began to rise again. The Minister knows the numbers better than I do. I am not saying it was a flood of cases, but people who were protected are no longer protected.

There is one specific question where this amendment is concerned. I have the Citizens Information website in front of me. The Minister can go on that website right now and see the terms of the level 3 restrictions. People are not allowed to leave their county. If I live in Shankill and my landlord decides to put me out, one of the places I will have to look is across the county border in Bray. I will not find anything closer to Dún Laoghaire, where rents get more and more expensive. That is totally out of reach. If I am lucky I might get somewhere in Bray. However, level 3 restrictions mean that someone cannot leave Shankill to look for an apartment in Bray, which would be hard to find anyway. People are not allowed to have visitors to their houses under level 3 restrictions, never mind level 4.

One man, Brian, has been told there is no place for him but he can apply for a housing assistance payment, HAP, tenancy. One man who came to my clinic is in his 70s. He has several serious ailments. He is a long way down the social housing waiting list and he has been told to look for a HAP tenancy. At a time when level 3 restrictions prevent people from visiting each other and older people should be protecting themselves, does the Minister think they should be traipsing around looking for HAP tenancies? I certainly do not. It contradicts public health advice. If someone like that is evicted because they are not protected during this period, the Minister is endangering their health. He is encouraging them to breach the public health guidelines his own Government has imposed.

As I said earlier, making people homeless is simply incompatible with the drive to protect public health and to get people to adhere to the most basic precautions by limiting social contact. That applies as long as we are facing a pandemic, not only while we are under level 5 restrictions. That case is absolutely unanswerable. The Minister is saying that this may be true at level 5, but if we go to level 4 or level 3 it will not be true any more. He has not answered that point because he cannot. I will be interested to see if he can, but otherwise he should drop his objection to this amendment and let it pass.

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