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

I will support the amendment before us, in particular, along with the other amendments in the grouping. It covers some of the ground we sought to cover in our amendments Nos. 14 and 15.

It seems the Minister does not really want to answer the question that is being asked about these tenants. I never used the word "tsunami", by the way, although I acknowledge it has been bandied about a bit. I know, because I am dealing with a case I have mentioned many times in the House, that there is a group of human beings for whom, as soon as the 5 km travel restriction linked to the blanket ban on evictions was lifted, the clock began ticking on their eviction, namely, the tenants at St. Helen's Court. Now they are overholding because they have nowhere to go, but they have been evicted. They had protection, which the Minister took from them with that change. He has stated that he will introduce more comprehensive protections, which is good, but will they protect people in those circumstances? In the meantime, a group of people I know, and there have to be others, including some of the 1,122 tenants in the system who were mentioned, will be in similar circumstances.

It is worth considering the logic driving some of these evictions and why it is even more right that the Government should provide them with protection against these uncaring evictions. Deputy Ó Broin's amendment relates to the Residential Tenancies Act 2004. I have to hand a copy of a determination order from a hearing of the Residential Tenancies Board, RTB, that I attended on behalf of some of those residents. It really tells a story. I sat through the hearing and was disgusted by what happened, and I have since read over the document. The tenants were living in an apartment block and paying rent. Their landlord, obviously, got into trouble and a vulture fund came in and bought the apartment block. It tried to raise the rent by 60% or 70%, which would have driven out the tenants, but it backed off because the tenants resisted and took the case to the Residential Tenancies Board. The fund then issued a spurious eviction order against all the tenants on the grounds that it was going to refurbish the property, and the tenants rightly made the case at the time, a few years ago, that they did not need to be evicted to allow the place to be refurbished. It was a ruse to get them out, and they fought that successfully.

It was getting a bit embarrassing. PwC was representing the large American vulture fund and I raised the matter in the House. I do not know whether it subcontracted the dirty work of evicting the tenants to another crowd but then a crowd known as Mill Street Projects Limited came in and took over the case in 2019. It is based at an address I do not believe exists - Aught, Ture, Muff, or something - that spans three townlands in Donegal. I do not know how a company can have an address in three different townlands and an address in Derry where, when it is contacted, nobody is ever there. The company seems to be quite an outfit. In any event, it took over the case in 2019 and tried to evict the remaining tenants, many of whom had left at this stage, although there were originally 20 of them. Many of them had left because the stress of it was too much for them, but others had nowhere to go, so they were still there.

This crowd then issued an eviction notice stating that it had not decided whether it would sell or refurbish the property but it wanted the tenants out in any case. That ran foul of the Tyrrelstown amendment which, obviously, the company's legal advisers had not sussed out, so it backed off at the last minute. A few weeks later, it stated that it was not actually going to evict ten tenants, because that was not allowed, so it would evict eight of them instead, as if it was not going to come back later and get the other two. We contacted the RTB, with the tenants and Threshold, and explained what was blatantly obvious, that is, that it was a ruse, that the company was going to evict eight of the tenants because it could not evict ten and that it was going to come back for the other two as soon as the legislation allowed it to do that, which I think was six months later.

The cold logic of the hearing is worth considering. The tenants had explained that this was a ruse and that they had done nothing wrong, and the representative of the landlord confirmed he was employed by the landlord company as an investment manager. The determination order quotes him as stating that it was his job to assess all options for the dwelling with a view to realising the best value, and he submitted that it was always the landlord's intention to refresh and resell the dwelling based on a commercial decision. It goes on to state that a named real estate agent had been engaged for the purposes of sale and that the landlord had created an owner-manager company and reiterated it was always the company's intention to sell it following a refresh he estimated would take ten or 12 weeks.

In other words, the landlord was saying clearly to the RTB that it had bought the place in 2019, and the only thing it had ever intended to do was evict the tenants to increase its value and flip it on, and that is allowed.

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