Martin Kenny (Sligo-Leitrim, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome this legislation and we will be supporting it insofar as it goes, in that it is very much an emergency stopgap legislation to deal with the crisis that has evolved. The crisis in a rental sector reaches to every part of the country. My colleague from Galway mentioned a city area. In rural areas everywhere, this problem exists where people who are in accommodation, many of them for many years, are faced with very significant increases in rent. A woman was in my office last week who is working three days a week in a supermarket, has two small children and is on her own, and her rent went up six months ago from €500 a month to €850 a month. The landlord refuses to take HAP. HAP is very much a measure to try to help people but many landlords refuse to take it because the market is such that they can choose outside of it. There is nothing she can do about it because she cannot find anywhere else and she is pleading to find a local authority house where she will have stability so that cannot happen to her.

I have another instance where a woman in a rural area in County Leitrim contacted us again in recent weeks where she and her husband are in a house and were paying approximately €600 a month. Their landlord has now put their rent up to more than €900 a month. Again, there is nothing she can do about it because there is nowhere else to go. That is the case for many people throughout the country.

We saw the situation in Sligo earlier this year where a landlord had nine or ten houses in a whole housing estate and increased the rent by over 150% in some cases. He put it up through the roof because he wanted to push the people to get out of there because he wanted to put others in. This area is not one of the zones we have set out, so simply nothing could be done. I raised this issue in the Chamber with the Minister and with the Taoiseach but nothing can be done. This is the problem we have where so many people are in this vulnerable position.

I also want to acknowledge, as previous speakers have talked about landlords, that many landlords are also in a difficult position. Not all landlords are bad people. Most of them are decent people who want to do their best. There are some out there, however, who see the opportunity to make a killing on this and that is a problem that has to be dealt with. This particular Bill, insofar as it goes, is about giving people a little bit of breathing space. That breathing space has to be used by Government, however, to ensure we put more accommodation in place for people and we find a way to provide more housing for more people to give them some stability and sense that they have a future. There are so many people now who are very much in dire straits. I know they are in the Minister of State’s and in every constituency, and every Deputy is dealing with this every day of the week. It is not just people from poorer families or from what used to be termed the working class or the council housing estates, but it is from everywhere and affecting everyone now.

I have had people on to me who are qualified with very good jobs but who simply cannot get anywhere to rent. Three girls contacted me who are schoolteachers living in Dublin, and all three are living in the same house. The rent has gone through the roof to the stage that they want to move back out to a rural area where they could find some cheaper rent. That is the case for so many people. The crisis we have in housing is particularly acute in the rental sector, and while this legislation will do something about putting a ban on evictions for a short time, the real answer is to ensure we provide adequate housing for our people.

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