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

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. This is the problem when the senior Minister is not here: we just get script. No disrespect to the Minister of State, Deputy Noonan, but that is the problem. None of what he said stops the cliff edge Jackie, her husband and their two kids face in being evicted next Friday from the home in which they have lived all their lives, and this during what is supposedly a moratorium on such evictions. That is what is happening in reality. What the Minister of State said does not stop the stress the 35 residents and families with kids and so on in Tathony House face as their landlord tries to drum them all out from the places where they have lived. All of them paid their rent and never did anything wrong and they are being chucked out on the street. Then there is Rathmines Road.

The Government needs to say clearly that people who pay their rent and have done nothing wrong will not end up in homeless accommodation. That can be done by banning such evictions and by having a clear policy whereby the State will step in and buy properties where landlords are exiting the market, regardless of whether those tenants' incomes are slightly over an income threshold - an arbitrary, cliff-edge income threshold, to use the term the Minister of State has just used.

See this speech in context