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

The well-being framework rightly points to access to housing as a key component of well-being. For the more than 100 residents of Tathony House, an apartment complex in Dublin 8 with 35 households of workers, families and many children, their well-being was seriously shattered by an eviction notice from their landlord threatening the mass eviction of the entire block. Shockingly, the person who owns this property, who the residents estimate is probably making an annual income of about €700,000 a year, is trying to claim financial hardship as a justification for a mass eviction, which just tells us about some of the landlord class in this country.

The residents - I put this to the Taoiseach, as we have done with St. Helen's Court in Dún Laoghaire and other cases where tenants have faced eviction through no fault of their own - are asking that the State step in and buy that block to ensure there is no mass eviction of these tenants. That should be a systematic policy pursued by the Government. We just cannot have a situation where, again and again, ruthless, profit-hungry landlords, just to make money, can threaten people with mass eviction into homelessness, with all the suffering, hardship and trauma that involves. I hope the Taoiseach will take seriously that request.

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