Willie O'Dea (Limerick City, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Will the Taoiseach ask the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage to intervene on behalf of 60 families - 150 people in all - who are tenants of the Shannon Arms housing complex in Henry Street, Limerick? Even though those people have taken their case to the Residential Tenancies Board, the landlords of those apartments are employing intimidatory and illegal tactics to force them to leave their homes. The tactics include sending in heavies to change the locks unilaterally and ordering people to get their furniture together and get out on the street within 30 minutes. Some of those tactics have worked and some of the more vulnerable people have actually left. The Taoiseach will be aware that these tactics are not only reprehensible and immoral, but highly illegal and reminiscent of the behaviour of the absentee landlords during the great Famine of the 1840s. This is not the 1840s. I ask the Taoiseach whether the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage can be requested to assist those people against this modern form of Rachmanism.

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