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

Last year, People Before Profit brought a Bill to the Dáil that proposed a constitutional referendum to enshrine the right to housing. There was a commitment in the programme for Government to have a referendum on housing but nothing is happening on these things. There are consequences for real human beings as a result of the Government's failure to do something on this.

On dozens of occasion, I have raised the plight of tenants in St. Helen's Court, Dún Laoghaire, a multi-unit apartment complex bought by two successive vulture funds. Tenants who have lived there for years and years, who always paid their rent, are decent working people and never did a thing wrong will be in court in the first week of February, when the vulture fund will get an enforcement order to throw them out because legally it is allowed do so. The vulture fund does not need the accommodation for family members. It is not a so-called mom-and-pop landlord. The fund has no reason to throw these tenants out other than to increase its profits and the value of that property. By the way, 12 of the units in that property have now been sitting empty for two years, fully refurbished, not rented out to people and not leased to the council, but the vulture fund will not rent them to the tenants it is going to evict.

The lawyer we got to represent the tenants in court said that there was no argument against this injustice but if the right to housing was enshrined in the Constitution, that lawyer would have a legal argument to protect these tenants, who have done nothing wrong, against a cruelly unjust eviction. When will the Government address these kinds of unjust evictions and put the right to housing into the Constitution?

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