Rose Conway-Walsh (Mayo, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

As my colleague stated, the Residential Tenancies (Student Rents and Other Protections) (Covid-19) Bill 2021 seeks to end the rip-off relating to students and their families. I would first like to commend the USI and the previous speaker, my colleague, Deputy Ó Broin, and his team for the work they have done on this Bill. In addition, I acknowledge the 56 Opposition Deputies who have already signed up to the Bill.

We are living through a housing crisis that has a real impact on access to third level education, especially for people living outside the cities and large towns. Despite Ireland having the highest fees in the EU, accommodation is, for many families, the biggest financial barrier to getting students to third level education, particularly those from rural Ireland. Students are often in low-paid, part-time work or rely on the support that their families can afford to give them.

Students are treated differently by landlords, particularly those in purpose-built student accommodation, where they are often asked to pay a full semester's rent in advance. We have to be cognisant of the financial situation of students themselves, who have not been able to get employment in the pandemic, and of their parents and siblings, who have lost employment. In recent days, figures released by Social Justice Ireland show that a quarter of working families are living in poverty. These are the same people who we have allowed to be robbed in the past year because they are paying upfront for something which, under law, they were prevented from using.

Approximately 30,000 students live in privately provided, purpose-built student accommodation. When the pandemic hit last March, it exposed the severe injustices students face in the rental market. They were on the hook for accommodation they no longer needed and the vast majority never received refunds. Since Fine Gael entered government, it has given €87 million in tax breaks to the providers of purpose-built student accommodation. Despite the huge amount of public money they have received, many of these landlords have refused to issue refunds. I must, however, commend the landlords who issued refunds straight away.

During the summer and after the experience of the first wave I and others repeatedly warned of the risks that would be faced by student renters if college moved online again. Students were given the optimistic assessments and positive headlines when they needed the Government to be straightforward and realistic with them. The Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science, Deputy Harris, said on 31 August that "students were treated a bit shabbily"when colleges closed their doors at the beginning of the pandemic. I agreed with him in that regard. He went on to say: "If ever ... there were further restrictions and colleges had to close, we need to make sure that all the students get refunded." That was a month before it was announced that students would not be returning to campus. In October, after colleges had moved online and reports of students again being denied refunds began flooding into all our offices, I asked the Minister how he would ensure that students received refunds. The answer was that he had no powers directly available to him under the existing legal framework relating to private accommodation. When I raised the issue with the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage and the housing officer, I was simply told that the matter did not fall within the remit of the Department.

I commend the USI and everybody who has worked on this Bill. The Government should have introduced emergency legislation in this area in the first instance. However, it is never too late to do the right thing. Student renters were cast aside again. They were the subject of too many promises and were left under-protected. We can never allow that to happen again. The aim behind the Bill is to ensure that students will not be left in the position I have outlined in the future. If the Bill becomes law, a student will be able to end a tenancy in purpose-built student accommodation by serving the landlord with a notice of termination of 28 days and get a refund.

We owe it to the students of Ireland and their families to right the wrong that has been done to them since the beginning of the pandemic. If one of us went into a shop and paid between €5,000 and €9,000 for something, as these families have done, and were then ordered to leave the shop without getting what we paid for and were told we would never get our money back, we would not accept it. Why should student renters be treated differently? There is a real opportunity here for us to work collectively across the House to put this right.

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