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

Okay. We have written successively on these cases to the Ministers and all we get are acknowledgements. That is what we get - we get acknowledgements. Will the Government extend purchase in situto people over the thresholds who cannot afford the rent? Jackie and her husband, who are working, with their kids always paid the rent and did nothing wrong, . Since they got their first notice to quit, they are not covered by the existing ban, which speaks to the point made by the Minister of State, who said the ban would be for people who are validly evicted. Yes, they were validly evicted on grounds of sale but they have done nothing wrong. Does the Minister of State know how many houses and apartments they have looked at on Daft.ie and MyHome.ie over the last year? It is 700 - every single day, dozens of them, looking for places. The most recent one they looked at, just before they walked into the court on Friday to face a judge and a landlord who is the owner of multiple properties and is seeking to evict them, was €2,700 a month. That was the cheapest available but totally unaffordable. This is a man working for a semi-State company and his family. They could pay €1,000 and, at a push, they say they could pay €1,500. What are they supposed to do? They are not even entitled to HAP. Will the Government extend HAP to people in these situations? No. The computer says “No.”

That is what we get when it comes to people facing homelessness. What I want from this Government is a policy that says the default position is not to put people into homelessness. Yes, of course, we will take amendments on this and we will look at particular circumstances. I met that landlady who is herself homeless. Of course, we want to accommodate people like that but the default position should be that the State does everything in its power to stop people ending up homeless, particularly children. We passed a referendum on Children First, saying it is essentially a form of abuse and neglect for people not to have that sort of security and a roof over their heads, yet we have thousands of such children, and thousands more will end up in this traumatic, cruel, inhumane situation unless the default position is to stop people going into homelessness.

Of course, that is not the entire solution. It is a stopgap; it is a Band-Aid to prevent a disaster from turning into a catastrophe. What we need while that is being done, as we made absolutely clear, is to accelerate the delivery of public and affordable housing. We need to do something about the absolute scandal of property and land sitting vacant or derelict and not being used. Some people go on about planning permission here. I have just produced a report which shows 75,000 planning permissions over the last few years but only delivery of 5,000 per year because they are sitting on planning permissions, watching the value of their assets go up. Do something about that and we might get some movement on the housing crisis.

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