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

I thank the Simon Community for bringing forward the provisions of the Bill and I thank Deputy Ó Broin for co-ordinating the all-party effort to support the legislation. The Bill would give people three months leeway when faced with eviction into homelessness and it would give local authorities the right to trigger that three-month extension. The most important element of the Bill is the requirement that during those three months, local authorities would try to prevent the people in question from becoming homeless.

That brings me to the key issue. Fianna Fáil and the Green Party were in government at the time and said they would end homelessness by 2010. That did not happen. The Fine Gael-Labour Party programme for Government of 2011 pledged to end homelessness by the end of its term. That did not happen. There was a promise to get everybody out of hotels by 2016. That did not happen either, and we could go on through the list of failed promises.

Does the Government want to stop people going into homelessness? If so, it can just do it. It is set down as a policy that nobody will be put into homelessness and that the local authority will ensure people are housed rather than go into emergency accommodation. It is very simple and it can be done within that three months, but there is no will to do it.

I am dealing with so many cases as we face into Christmas, and I will give them another shout-out. There are the family with six kids living in an hotel who have been in four different homelessness accommodation providers over four years and were recently threatened with eviction. Fair play to the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage, who intervened, although if he had not, I do not know what I would think of him. They were going to be evicted because they had briefly exceeded the income thresholds, which have not been reviewed yet even though the review started four years ago.

In the case of another family, a young woman who works in the public sector and lives with her daughter in homelessness accommodation has also been threatened with eviction from homelessness services because she does additional work with vulnerable children and her overtime and additional hours took her over the threshold and threatened her with being put out in the street.

A man who came into my office last week has worked all his life, has money to pay his rent and did not need help or support but had a catastrophic accident and now cannot work because of that. He has three children and has been trying to get medical priority, which he does not deny. He sat down in front of me and started bawling crying because he had been given a date two weeks later by which he would have to leave his HAP tenancy. I could go on through the list of people I am dealing with but I do not have time. Believe me, they are contacting me as Christmas approaches, asking whether I have any news from the Minister or the council.

It is entirely possible for the Government to say it will not allow that to happen anymore but it does not do that because, I do not know, a few landlords might be annoyed.I do not understand it. Why does this go on? Why do we continue to let this happen? The place finder service is a joke. Place finders are supposed to find places within limits, when they and everybody else knows you have only to look on daft.ieand see that nowhere is available within the maximum limits that have been set. It is a joke. By definition, people are homeless if they need a place to live, do not have a roof over their head or are threatened with eviction. Something could be done about that and the question is whether the Government is going to do it, or whether we are just going to faff around with a load of promises that were never kept previously and that I doubt will be kept to this time.

Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council has to submit a plan for social housing by the middle of December and has been told by the Government to deliver 1,994 social homes by 2026, but there are 7,000 families on the housing list. By definition, therefore, we will still be having this conversation at the end of the Government's plan to deal with the housing crisis. Can we get real?

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