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

The Government has been forced to introduce an eviction ban. Over the past four years, People Before Profit has brought in four different Bills proposing eviction bans. The Government has argued against them. It has dragged its heels and resisted. It put up every argument as to why it could not happen and why it was problematic constitutionally, but when sufficient pressure came on, it was forced to introduce it, but, as Deputy Murphy said, in the most minimalist fashion possible.

One of the groups that will suffer as a result of the minimalist approach taken by the Government are people who have already received and past their termination date. Deputy Murphy gave one example and I will give another: a couple and their two children, whose termination date was last Friday week from a home the parents have lived in since they were born in the 1950s. The landlord has multiple properties. They are not suffering any financial hardship. One can only speculate as to why they are selling but I think it is fair to say that, given the number of landlords who are selling up and evicting people consequently, that it has something to do with the extortionately high level of house prices at the moment. Landlords are cashing in and they are doing that precisely on the Government's failure to deal with the housing crisis. Why do property prices go up? They go up because there is a shortage of housing. The worse the housing crisis gets, the more the property of landlords and large property owners is worth. That is the way it works. The more they can charge in rent, the higher the price they can command when they sell. When they think it has reached the peak, they sell and they do not care about the human wreckage they leave behind, in this case by evicting a working family with two children where the parents in this family have lived in the house since the 1950s, because they are cashing in and that is allowed.

I pointed this out here last week. I was the first person in the Dáil to point out that the Government's eviction ban did not protect them. There was not a word in response to that from the Government. Even though it was flagged on several occasions, there was nothing in the Minister of State’s speech to explain why that gap has been left. There is simply no justification. Worse again, what will every single local authority housing section I know of tell anyone who is facing an eviction and has passed their termination date, given the authorities have virtually no emergency accommodation, if they have any at all, and no social housing to offer most of the people in that situation, and there is virtually no affordable housing? What does the State tell people to do in that situation? It tells them to overhold. It is an unspoken but all-pervasive policy. It is not just Deputy Murphy, I and other Deputies who tell people in these situations they have no choice and they will have to overhold but local authority housing departments are also telling them they have to overhold because those departments have nothing for them. However, the Government is not going to protect those people with this Bill. How can the Minister of State justify that? I just do not understand.

We have tabled an amendment on this but, of course, the Government has guillotined the debate tonight so we probably will not reach it. In any event, our amendment was ruled out of order on the basis it represents a charge on the Exchequer to extend the eviction ban to those who have already passed the termination date. I was scratching my head when I heard that one. How is that a charge on the Exchequer? That was done during the Covid eviction ban which the Government was also forced into introducing after weeks and weeks of pressure. How is that a charge on the Exchequer? I would really like somebody to explain that to me. Therefore we cannot debate that amendment and vote on it tonight although we probably would never reach it because the Government has guillotined Committee Stage to 60 minutes. Families are terrified and have nowhere to go. They are all searching daft.ie, myhome.ie, ringing up the place finder section, which is in an equally despairing and hopeless situation, looking for rental properties, and there is no emergency accommodation available for them, but we are not going to protect them. It is flipping outrageous.

The duration of the ban is also outrageous, given the situation. It will end at the end of March. Some of the protections may last until the summer but then we will have thousands of people facing eviction again. It has to be extended for a year at least, as again we are proposing in an amendment. Frankly, it should be extended for the duration of the emergency. The Dáil officially declared a housing emergency in 2018. Again, it was forced to do that because of the Raise the Roof protest when there were 10,000 people out on the streets. People Before Profit put forward a motion on behalf of the Raise the Roof campaign. Finally, after denying it for about five years, the Government conceded there was a housing emergency. If there is a housing emergency, there is no question that we are constitutionally protected in taking emergency measures. I do not buy for one minute the legal arguments the Government used to try to justify not doing that. We have done it before when the Government said we could not, and we are doing it again now. There is an emergency, declared by this House, and that gives the Government the legal constitutional basis on which to protect people from being driven into homelessness.

Most disgustingly, every single child who is made homeless is going to be marked for life. The Government is lucky that in the case of the family I mentioned, they do not want to talk to the media because the parents are terrified their children will be humiliated in school. That is the situation of so many of these families and that is the situation the Government is putting them in. The mental health of children is being put on the rack because they are facing the humiliation of being made homeless. There should be absolute protection against that and it should last until we provide them with alternative, affordable and secure accommodation.

Could we do that in the period of the duration of this eviction Bill? Not on the current policy trajectory of the Government, but would it be possible to make a significant impact over the duration of this eviction ban Bill? It would if the Government were willing to do certain things. First is that it would actually do something about vacant and derelict properties. For example, in my area, there is a building called Kelly’s Hotel. It is owned by the council. It has been empty for around 20 years. I do not know how many times I have brought it up in this Chamber or with the council. At one stage the council wanted to sell it. We kicked up enough of a fuss to stop that. Now it is just sitting there empty. It is perfectly suitable to house people in. Nothing happens. It just sits there. There are Ukrainian refugees desperate for accommodation. There are people 20 years on the housing list. There is no homeless accommodation available in the area. Kids and families are sent into hostels in town when they are going to school in Ballybrack, Sallynoggin or Shankill. It is flipping outrageous that the State itself is sitting on empty properties.

I will mention Tathony House again because if the Government does not do something about that, then the same thing will happen there as happened in St. Helen’s Court. Landlords try to get around the Tyrrelstown amendment, but even if the RTB asserts they cannot do that, the tenants themselves are so stressed that they start to leave. They will be forced out because of the pressure, anxiety and stress. That landlord, with a €700,000 a year rent roll, is claiming he has the right to evict people on the grounds of financial hardship.

Can you believe it? Can you believe the venality and greed of a landlord who would do that to people? Some of the tenants will leave and then the properties will be vacant. Then the landlord can do exactly what a vulture fund does. I refer to an Irish vulture fund. The landlord of Tathony House is an Irish landlord evicting people, one of our so-called own. When tenants leave, a landlord can sit on empty properties, as was done in the case of St Helen's Court for three years. There are 17 empty properties, and the State allows it to happen. It does not take them over.

The Government currently gets 10% of most new private developments. It is a pathetic figure considering that house and rent prices are such that about 70% to 80% of people in the Dublin area could not afford them. The State is getting only 10% of new builds. All the rest will be rented or sold at prices that ordinary working people could not possibly afford. Why do we allow that to happen? Most of the developments in question are on sites that were previously in the ownership of NAMA and that the developers bought from that agency at a major discount. Often they make massive capital gains out of selling these properties. They do not even pay capital gains tax on them in many cases because of the tax loopholes they benefit from. To me, it is obvious what you do in that situation. You do what they do in Finland, for example. In Finland, 25% of any new development has to be social housing and 30% has to be affordable housing. Therefore, 55% of any new development has to be social and affordable housing. One might ask why, in the current situation in Ireland, anything less than 100% should not comprise social and affordable housing. In all seriousness, what is the point of building housing that is not affordable? There is none. The State and the buyer or renter get screwed for massive amounts of money. What is the point in that? The State should buy 100% of the developments. Admittedly, that would be at a cost but there is a way it can be got back. A windfall tax could be applied to the capital gains the people in question will make out of the sale. One could take the money back off them. They should not have got it in the first place. The greatest scandal ever in this State was the disposal of the NAMA property to them. They should not make a cent out of it. We should acquire 100% of the sites and tax the windfall gains made by the developers so we can get the money back. In this way, we would start to have a serious impact.

If those who live in south Dublin drive down the N11 on their way to Wicklow or Arklow, they will see all the apartment complexes being built in the region, some of which are near completion. Currently, we are getting 10% of them. We should be getting at least what the Finnish get in Helsinki, namely, 55%. I would say it should be 100%. The State should buy the complexes and then it could solve the problem. Cherrywood, the biggest residential development in the history of the State, is on what was NAMA-owned land. As things stand, the beneficiaries will be foreign investors, including Dutch pension funds. They will rent at extortionate levels and sell at extortionate prices that nobody can afford. Now there is pressure on the banks to start lending money to people that they cannot really afford, with interest rates going up. Believe it or not, we are actually threatening to do what we did before 2008. There is an alternative. It is for the State to take the property back, buy it all out and deliver it all as affordable and social housing. We built the infrastructure with the local infrastructure housing activation fund, LIHAF. We have paid for the roads and parks with public money but private investors will reap the benefit. What we are doing is just insane. The solutions are in front of us if we are willing to take the necessary action.

My last point, which I am making yet again, is on income thresholds. As our motion pointed out today, in 2008 some 48% of households were entitled to social housing or eligible to go on the social housing list. The ESRI points out that because of the Government's failure to increase the thresholds, that was down to 33% by the end of 2019. That means it is well below 30% now. This is happening when more households than ever need the support because house prices and rents have gone up.

There has been a massive stealth cut to the proportion of households eligible for State support. You will not even get social housing because you will be on a list for 20 years, but at least you might get housing assistance payment, HAP, support as an interim, temporary measure. If you are over the threshold, you are goosed. The Government support is very clear about the reason for the delay in raising the thresholds. It states it has to ration social housing. The word "ration" appears on about 20 occasions. That is what it is down to. It is not down to justice or anything like that. Precisely when people need assistance more than ever in accessing housing, the proportion of eligible households has been dramatically cut.

The reason the Government does not want to do what I suggest is because it does not want to acknowledge the scale of the problem. However, one does not solve a problem unless one acknowledges it and how many people actually need State support through the delivery of social and affordable housing and, at a minimum, financial assistance to secure housing they can afford.

See this speech in context