Réada Cronin (Kildare North, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

It is a very apt time for this Private Members' Bill on residential tenancies and the extension of the notice period because at Christmas our thoughts turn to home, family, children and the life we share in our homes. I am glad that the Opposition is united in its support for this piece of work with the Simon Community. I also welcome the fact that the Minister is going to accept the Bill. It is important that the legislation be implemented because we need a radical overhaul of our housing policy and system. While we wait for that change, this Bill makes a crucial difference for the almost 10,000 men, women and children facing homelessness by the end of the year. Emergency accommodation is not a solution to landlords getting away with issuing short notices to quit. The short notice that landlords are getting away with is the problem. Emergency accommodation, by its nature, is only shelter. Shelter is what is given to a stray animal that turns up at someone's door late at night. People need homes. People need to move from one home to another. To do that, they need some notice, like the minimum of three months proposed in this Bill. Above all, the Government needs to acknowledge the shock to the system that those going into emergency accommodation experience. It is the brutal realisation that it is a hostel, a hub or the street. The people I have spoken to in north Kildare are devastated when that happens to them. It goes to the core of their families. Politicians make light of it and say how lucky people are to get emergency accommodation at all, knowing that they will never need it, and it is never going to be them, their families, their children or grandchildren who are facing emergency accommodation. The Government loves to talk about stability and tells us to "#bekind", but much of it comes from political quarters that see runaway house prices and rents as a sign of a successful economy. They see homelessness as the norm and emergency accommodation as inevitable. There is nothing civil about the Government's housing policy. There is nothing that we should accept about it either. We are proposing the structured mechanism of the minimum three-month notice period to give people some kind of protection.

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