Cathal Crowe (Clare, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister again for bringing this legislation before the House. It is progressive legislation and is the fourth time since last summer he has brought forward such legislation before the House to protect tenants during the Covid pandemic. Despite what others have said in terms of populist grandstanding, this legislation protects people. I know several constituents, some of whom live close to me, who have been very much protected by this legislation to date. It is fine to talk about blanket eviction notices and so on, but there are a minority cohort who have chosen to use the Covid pandemic as an excuse to stop paying rents and ramp up their anti-social behaviour. What this legislation does and has done up to now is strike that delicate balance between protecting tenants and protecting those who own those properties from the properties being abused.

The income thresholds for social housing are an issue we have spoken about many times. I would love to see the Minister's Department progress that because the current income thresholds date back to the 2011 regulations. They were fine at the time but we have seen such fluctuations in the market since then in the price of housing to buy and sell, in the rental market and in social and local authority housing. We have seen the way people's incomes and everything else have fluctuated but the income thresholds have not changed in a decade. They need to be changed. I understand there is a memorandum in the Minister's Department. I would love to see it progressed and come out the other end, so to speak.

I would love to see the Minister's Department look more closely at houses in rural areas. On any housing application form in any county, there are probably only a dozen locations where a person can tick off a box to indicate he or she wants to live there. In between, community after community is being hollowed out. We need to look at that. There needs to be more spread in terms of where people are being socially housed and not ghettoise people into 100 or 200 housing developments. We saw in decades past how that failed. Small clusters of houses, such as the one the Department is currently planning, are the way forward in addition to more of a spread in and around counties to ensure rural areas are reinvigorated.

See this speech in context