Dáil debates

Wednesday, 14 September 2022

Measures to Assist with Household Bills: Motion [Private Members]

 

7:45 pm

Photo of Eoin Ó BroinEoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank my colleagues, Deputies O'Rourke and Doherty and others for tabling this important motion today. Like Deputies right across the House, pretty much every day I am dealing with families who are experiencing a level of financial stress that I certainly have never seen in my time as a Deputy in this House. For example, I am dealing with housing assistance payment, HAP, tenants who are unable to keep up with the cost of living and their top-up to the landlords. They are begging their local authorities to give them a discretionary uplift, which they are being refused, and therefore they are imminently at risk of homelessness. I am also dealing with private renters who are just above the thresholds for social housing and who are working two jobs to keep the roof over their head. This is despite the fact that the Government has not increased the social housing thresholds since 2011 and continues to refuse to do so. Again, those same families are unable to make ends meet or are fearful of what will happen if they get a notice to quit, which would render them homeless. I am talking to mortgage holders who have now had two interest rate hikes. If the second hike is passed on by their bank, that will wipe out everything we are hearing from Government with regard to the meagre measures it is proposing to deal with the rising cost of energy. I raise these three cases because they are real-life cases that I and many other Deputies are dealing with day in and day out. Common to all of these families is that they simply cannot afford the cost of heating their homes or using utilities to keep their children fed and to keep clean the clothes on their backs. The idea that giving those people, on its own, a cash payment no matter what amount, simply does not deal with the key concern they have which is that even with a cash payment, the prices themselves are too high and people are fearful of further price hikes.

The great merit to the Sinn Féin proposal that Deputy McDonald outlined earlier today, which Deputy O'Rourke has just outlined, and which Deputies Doherty and Mairéad Farrell will outline in fine detail when we publish our alternative budget on Friday week, is that it deals with the immediate cost by dragging those costs back to summer 2021 levels, it puts money back in a targeted way into the pockets of lower income families, and it ensures that they will not have any further price rises between now and February or March of next year. I do not see how anybody could think that this was not the most sensible way to approach this.

Today the Taoiseach was incredibly disingenuous when he used the phrase "blank cheque". From all of the media that Deputies Doherty, McDonald and others did yesterday, the Taoiseach is aware that the purpose of our proposed windfall tax is to be a tax on excessive profits if companies choose to try to use it as a blank cheque, which is something they would not be able to do under our proposals. This is sensible and it is needed. If the Government does not do something like this, those families out there who are under such enormous pressure, will have the worst winter in decades. It does not have to be that way. The Minister can make a real difference and I urge him to support this proposal.

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