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

I heard those comments and I will deal with them in a minute. Actually, I will deal with them now. The Minister should not attribute quotes to me that I never made. I never, ever used the phrase "tsunami of evictions". A very well known housing activist who is not a Member of this House used that phrase. In my opinion, his concerns were just concerns, given the heroic role he plays in dealing with the homeless in this city and his awareness of how most of the people with whom he has to deal were evicted from private rented accommodation.

As we are on the topic, it is disappointing, given that the Minister has brought in a number of unrelated issues in one Bill in this completely unacceptable way of doing business, mixing moderately good things with some really not good things, that he did not do something really important, such as address the issue of vulture funds evicting people and using the issue of sale as the excuse for so doing. As I warned the Minister, as soon as the level 5 restrictions and the pause on evictions that goes with them was lifted, the vulture fund that owns St. Helen's Court in Dún Laoghaire moved in on the tenants. This week, I had to go down there with the tenants and face the vulture funds and their heavyweight barristers, who pretty much stated that the evictions may be immoral and driven by profit, but they are within the law. That is essentially the argument made by the barrister for the vulture fund. On a previous occasion, the vulture fund tried to evict ten of the tenants but the so-called Tyrrelstown amendment protected them. The vulture fund got legal advice, reduced the number to eight and it moved to evict those eight tenants as soon as level 5 was lifted. Why did the Minister not close that window? Those tenants will now almost certainly be evicted. They will then rock up at my office and the offices of Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council, looking for homeless HAP or emergency accommodation. The Minister could have stopped that through this legislation if he had listened to the facts. Similarly, I just heard today that, following the lifting of the pause on evictions, residents in Rathmines were evicted this week in the teeth of Christmas and in the midst of a pandemic. The Minister should have brought in a Bill to stop that from happening.

On substitute consent, we will discuss the issue further on Committee Stage. The Bill contains the bare minimum required to deal with the Supreme Court judgment issued in July and the ruling of the European Court of Justice ruling. A lot more needs to be done. I heard the Minister's response to my comment that there is systematic abuse of substitute consent. I say there is systematic abuse because it involves the big guys deliberately trying to do the minimum in terms of environmental impact. It is not the number of applications for substitute consent. Some of these big, profit-driven developers try to do the absolute minimum in terms of public consultation and environmental impact assessment. Substitute consent, that is, retention, is a mechanism essentially to sort of get them off the hook after the fact. I welcome the moderate measures forced on the Minister, but a hell of a lot more needs to be done. This will be a live issue with more developments of giant wind farms and so on, both onshore and offshore.

On the issue of real, physical public meetings not having to take place, that is justified under Covid but it is pretty depressing having to substitute real public meetings for Zoom meetings or Microsoft Teams meetings. It is not good for the human spirit, democracy or planning. It has been forced on us in Covid, but to make it permanent is fundamentally wrong. That wrong move should not have been included in a Bill that we would otherwise support, albeit not with great enthusiasm, for the modest improvements it contains. The Minister should not have included that measure. It is controversial and fundamentally misguided.

See this speech in context