Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

We fully support the Bill and welcome its introduction. It is absolutely needed and I do not think any decent person in the country would shed a tear about any landlord who would advertise sex for rent or engage in that practice.

As Deputy Barry said, they are creeps of the highest order and everybody in this House is morally outraged by this practice.

I thank the Social Democrats for bringing the Bill forward. Having said that, this is not the first time in my lifetime that I have heard of this practice. In the 1980s, my sister conducted research for the Department of Health on the health needs of homeless women. In interviewing several hundred such women, she found that there was exploitation of this nature of very vulnerable women, who usually had high needs or addictions, in homeless accommodation which, in those days, usually meant bed and breakfast accommodation. That same exploitation was taking place but this is a notch up because it is being advertised for what it is and is happening in the year 2021. When Ireland is supposed to have progressed and moved forward, these most obscene practices are bringing us back towards those dark ages. That is why we welcome the Bill.

I want to talk about the Government's support of the Bill. The Government will obviously have to support it. As I have said, everybody here is outraged by this practice and the Government has to support the Bill. However, I wish it would see the deep irony and contradictions in its position of supporting a Bill that bans sex for rent while not supporting measures that would have mitigated against us reaching such a point. In other words, the Government and those which preceded it brought us into this massive housing crisis, which has now gone on for nearly a decade, and, while supporting this Bill, it refuses to support a Bill that would freeze or control rents, a Bill that would deliver affordable housing and Bills that demand derelict properties be taken back into control. It has also blocked Bills that sought to enshrine a right to housing in the Constitution. It is hypocrisy because the root cause of this problem is the housing crisis and not just creepy landlords who will do anything to take advantage of vulnerable women and others. It is not just such landlords but the housing crisis perpetuated by this Government that is at the heart of the issue.

We would like to see a bit of consistency. The Government should support the Social Democrats' Bill but it should also finally deal with housing crisis rather than perpetuating it and blocking every progressive measure aimed at dealing with the root cause of the crisis brought forward from this side of the House. Instead of such measures, we have a Government that has had multiple meetings with vulture funds, cuckoo funds, developers and bankers to ask what it can do for them, how far it can bend for them, how many laws it can change and how many regulations it can reduce to facilitate their profits and developments. That has been the approach to housing while, at the same time, the provision of public, affordable and social housing has been run down throughout this State. This Bill is a consequence of the failed housing policy of successive Governments. The Government needs to fully deal with this issue in addition to giving full support to this Bill today.

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