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

I feel like I am living in a parallel universe whenever I hear the Government talk about housing. I hear about all these grand plans, but I believe there will only be one additional council house in my area this year and we only got one or two last year. All the rest is outsourced and now the Government is planning to outsource more through the Land Development Agency, LDA, and privatising public land.

I wish to raise the fraud that is the Residential Tenancies Bill 2021, which will be before the Dáil today, in that it is a pretence by the Government that the latter will protect tenants from eviction during the pandemic. Its protection is being extended to a tiny, limited cohort of people who have gone into arrears as a direct result of income loss due to Covid, but where everyone else is concerned, a green light is being given to landlords and vulture funds to evict people.

The Taoiseach may have read in The Irish Timesor heard on radio last week the details of a case that I have raised with him and the Minister repeatedly. It is a textbook case of tenants being mass evicted by vulture funds. There is nothing to protect them. How can the Taoiseach justify people being evicted into homelessness and the less safe environment of the homeless system on 5 April just because the 5 km rule is being changed when we still have a pandemic raging? This is just one of the many examples of unscrupulous corporate landlords and vulture funds that are, for no other reason that profit, evicting into homelessness decent people who have always paid their rents. The Government is going to allow it instead of doing what we are asking for as a minimum, that being, to extend the eviction ban until the pandemic has passed.

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