Ivana Bacik (Dublin Bay South, Labour) | Oireachtas source

This morning, I was aghast to hear the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage confirm to my colleague, Deputy Duncan Smith, that his Department has no modelling on the projected effect on homelessness rates of lifting the eviction ban. I was further aghast to read a parliamentary question reply to my office this morning, setting out the criteria used to justify lifting the ban in this way at this time. In the four paragraph reply I received, meteorological conditions got nearly two paragraphs and pressure on homeless services got one line to justify the duration of the eviction ban.

It is clear that the Government does not know the effect of the decision it has taken to lift the eviction ban with only three weeks to go until families start to get eviction notices. We are facing a social disaster and a potential tsunami of evictions in this country, with a return to the heartbreaking scenes we had some years ago of children having to sleep on the floor of Garda stations. This is a dreadful scenario and it is clear from the replies we got this morning that the Government has no evidence before it on the basis of which the decision was unexpectedly taken on Tuesday to lift the eviction ban. Will the Government reverse that decision?

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