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

I just find this extraordinary. The Minister of State is telling us he cannot answer the questions about these amendments to the Residential Tenancies Act that we have never debated in the Dáil and that are contained in building control legislation. The Minister of State who is taking the session does not know the answers. That is a joke of legislation. It absolutely makes a sham of legislation. I cannot believe it; well I can believe it actually, from this Government, but it is flipping outrageous.

Do not get me wrong, extending the notice period is a good thing but at this point, given some of us have been screaming for the past few weeks that we need emergency measures on the number of families going into homelessness because of evictions and so on, we should be discussing this as part of a residential tenancies amendment Bill to ban all evictions and give greater protections to people in a situation where evictions and family homelessness are going out of control.

Some of this seems okay. We do not really know what the rationale is behind other bits and the Minister of State has been sent in here to ram this through because that is what happens when you are ramming stuff through without proper debate. You do not send in the senior Minister because there is no intention to discuss any of this; it is just about ramming it through. All I can say is it is very sharp practice.

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