Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I too commend my newest Dáil colleague, Deputy Bacik, on her first legislation. This is an extremely important area and a fulfilment of her commitment.

We all know and acknowledge that solving the biggest social issue of our time, the crisis in housing provision, is complex. It requires a suite of actions and enormous resolve and resources. Like eating an elephant, we need to do it bite by bite. We know we will not make all the changes in one fell swoop. We will have the opportunity, and we are all focused on it, to critique and measure the Government's Housing for All proposals. Most of us will approach that as an honest attempt to solve once and for all this enormous social crisis that faces our communities.

Surely the first and most important action all Members of the Oireachtas must take is to stop, insofar as we can, the daily creation of homeless individuals and families. It is like somebody who is wounded: you want to treat the problems, but the first thing is to stop the haemorrhaging. That is what we seek to do in this Bill.

There are individuals and families today in rented accommodation who are being forced out of it. We know what is the single biggest driver of homelessness. It has been said again and again and looked at by a variety of researchers. Through no fault of their own, renters are losing their home. It is not a rental or investment property, but their home.

There is not a Member of this House who is not dealing today with families and individuals in despair because they face homelessness, having received a notice to quit. These are families and individuals who have paid their rent assiduously, sometimes with great struggle, sometimes paying exorbitant rents that amount to an extraordinarily large part of their income. They have received a notice to quit for a variety of reasons, most likely, in the market we are in, because the landlord, often an accidental landlord, feels the capital value of the property is something he or she wants to realise right now. Somebody's home is removed in one fell swoop and he or she looks around desperately for an alternative but there is none.

I do not represent a big urban area like Dublin, Cork or Galway but in my constituency office in Wexford today, we have six cases of families and individuals in that situation. I would say that is true for every Deputy in this House. These are people who never envisaged that they would be homeless. That is not them. They never saw that. Now they face a deadline and there is no alternative available. There is no property to rent but the landlord wants vacant possession and is legally entitled to it.

In the local government area, that could not happen. A tenant paying her or his rent and abiding by the tenancy agreement with the local authority has security of tenure permanently. We would not think of it any other way for local authority tenants. We give them a tenancy agreement and as long as they pay their rent and abide by the conditions of their tenancy, they can life there forever and their family can plan, grow and thrive there. We must act to protect renters in the private sector in exactly the same way. If we want a situation where we have private and public renters, why would we treat them so differently and leave people in the private rental sector in such a precarious position in terms of security of tenure?

It is ironic that we protect renters in the commercial sphere. A tenant buying a commercial property is protected. There is no issue with that. Why do we have this fixation with getting rid of a tenant in good standing who is paying the rent and living in a home? Why does such a tenant not have the same level of protection? Fundamentally underscoring Deputy Bacik's Bill and the work done by my colleague, Senator Moynihan, our spokeswoman in this area, is the intention to change the attitude to renting. There has been much talk about the European model of renting, whereby people, not only in Europe but in America and across the world, assume they can rent for generations. We have a different mindset here. We have created a false tension between landlords and renters that need not exist.

We need to ensure that people can rent unfurnished apartments, make them their own home, surround themselves with their own things and have their own pets in what will be their permanent home for as long as they want but that will only happen when we bring about the legislative changes that are underpinned in this legislation. It is only one of a suite of changes we need to make to address this crisis but it is a fundamental one to stop the ever-increasing tidal wave of homelessness that all Members are dealing with in our individual constituencies.

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