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

The Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage made very reckless, irresponsible and somewhat bizarre comments on the rising homelessness situation at the weekend when he suggested that it was to do with the number of European Economic Area, EEA, and non-economic area refugees - which, by the way, is everybody in the world - coming into the country, but not Ukrainians. I find this a bizarre statement for him to make. This seems like reckless deflection but with a potentially dangerous subtext, which some on the far right, worryingly, have already tried to pick up on. The Minister needs to be completely disabused of his notions. The reason the homelessness figures are going through the roof is because we had an eviction ban and a rent increase ban that were effective during Covid-19. Then, the Government removed those things, and the situation has gotten worse since then. The vast majority of people - and they are the ones coming into my clinic week in, week out - who end up in homeless services do so because they are evicted by landlords on grounds of sale when they have done absolutely nothing wrong, or because rents are absolutely astronomical and they cannot afford them, and the housing assistance payment, HAP, limits will not reach to those levels. I appeal to the Taoiseach and the Minister not to engage in dangerous deflection tactics and admit that they need to bring in things like an eviction ban to prevent evictions and control rents to make them affordable.

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