Micheál Martin (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The Bill proposes to stagger the end of the protections afforded in it to ensure there is no cliff-edge impact on 1 April next year. Importantly, the Bill applies to licences and tenancies in student-specific accommodation and to student tenancies in the general rental market. The Bill is required, as I said earlier, due to the ongoing acute supply constraints in the residential rental sector and the increase in homelessness presentations over the winter. We want to reduce the burden on homelessness services and the pressure on tenants and the residential tenancy market generally. The Bill is also designed to mitigate moral hazard insofar as the protection will not extend to a tenant who simply chooses not to pay his or her rent or to breach other tenant obligations.

We brought in a similar ban during Covid so it is not the first time we have done this. There is a context for it, which there has to be, and we are in the middle of a serious energy crisis with an exponential increase in pricing. There has also been a huge migration flow because of conflict in the world, particularly the war in Ukraine.

All of this is creating pressures on residential accommodation more generally and on the availability of emergency accommodation that the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage can rely on to house people who suddenly become homeless for a variety of reasons. That is the context for the intervention. There has to be balance to it.

Deputy Bacik referenced the in situscheme the Minister, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, introduced last July, where essentially he said to local authority managers they were free to buy houses if somebody is being evicted because a property is being sold. As I said, close to 650 properties have been purchased or are in the process of being purchased by local authorities as a result of that. That tenants in situare at risk of being evicted is a significant issue in itself. I take the Deputy's point. We are open to ensuring we can intervene to prevent evictions of this kind. It is a new departure in respect of local authority discretion. We are urging local authorities to do this. Deputy Bacik has called for greater consistency. The Minister is working on this in his communication.

The Minister has met representatives from the homelessness sector, the NGO sector, the Irish Property Owners Association, the Institute of Professional Auctioneers and Valuers, the Residential Tenancies Board and the Dublin Region Homeless Executive to get a proper sense of the situation from their perspective and how they see this Bill.

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