Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank Wayne Stanley and the Simon Communities of Ireland for its work on this simple but important legislation. I also acknowledge all the members of the other political parties in opposition who co-signed this Bill, including those in the Labour Party, the Social Democrats, the Independent Group, People Before Profit-Solidarity, as well as my own colleagues.

Everybody has said that legislation like this will be useful and that it will not solve all the problems in this area but that it will give us another tool to try to help address some of the issues in this regard and to help some of the people affected. I am the kind of person who takes people at their word and therefore I accept what has been said by all the Government representatives who spoke on this issue. The issue here, however, is not whether all of us here mean what we say but whether we do the things that we say we will. In that regard, if we let this Bill meander through Committee Stage for months and months, then it will be of no value. I urge the Minister of State to discuss with his colleagues in the Department whether there may be a way for the Government to take the spirit of this provision and to work it into legislation that the Government itself is going to enact early next year. That would mean that the Minister of State's officials would be able to deal with all the deficiencies in the Bill that he and the Minister outlined. In addition, it would also mean that the provisions would become law. We did something similar with the Residential Tenancies (Student Rents and Other Protections) (Covid-19) Bill 2021, which was based on the work of the Union of Students in Ireland, USI, as well as back when Eoghan Murphy was the Minister with responsibility in this area.

Those of us who have been in this House a little bit longer than the current Minister of State have a terrible sense of dejà vuwhen we have these debates. We are told of the Government’s commitment to addressing this issue and of the long list of actions and high levels of expenditure which will be mobilised to address the housing and homelessness crisis. Yet, month on month and year on year, the problems get worse. The Minister, Deputy Darragh O’Brien, was absolutely right when he said there was a significant drop in family homelessness, especially, in the first year and half after the onset of Covid-19. There is a simple reason for that and it was not because of any of the policies of the Government or its predecessor, other than an emergency ban on evictions due to the impact of Covid-19. That was a public health measure, and similar to one that many of us had been arguing for as a social policy emergency measure for many years.

The result was that homelessness fell by 60% across the State. In some areas, family homelessness fell by as much as 80%. The difficulty now is that all those protections have been removed and month-on-month the figures are rising in exactly the same way as they did when Eoghan Murphy was the Minister. I will work constructively with anybody to try to tackle this crisis. We will all be judged by our actions, however, and not by our words. Let us therefore ensure that in the weeks ahead our actions match the words that we all used here tonight. As I said at the end of my opening remarks, let us make 2022 the year of preventing homelessness and of dramatically reducing homelessness.

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