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

I thank Sinn Féin for tabling this motion. It is already clear that the Government has no respect whatsoever for any decision that this House might make to maintain an eviction ban as we in the Opposition wish to do because it has already ignored a Bill that was passed four weeks ago by People Before Profit, calling for the maintenance of the eviction ban for as long as the housing emergency is with us. That has been completely ignored and will no doubt be buried by the Government in the same way that it wants to bury this motion.

No matter how much the Minister tries to spin this, the cold, hard, cruel truth of what he is doing is that he is making a decision to allow thousands of families, individuals and, worst of all, children, to end up homeless when there is nowhere for them to go. There is no social housing, affordable rental accommodation, affordable accommodation to purchase or emergency accommodation. Even the horror of ending up in emergency accommodation, which is too awful to comprehend and is terrifying for people, is not given as an assurance. That is how bad things are. The Minister says we are scaremongering when we say there will be an avalanche. Has the Minister not noticed that we have the highest number of people in emergency accommodation ever seen in this State? If that is not an avalanche of homelessness, I do not know what is. Thousands of notices to quit are looming and as soon as the ban is lifted, those people are going to end up homeless or in crisis in the vast majority of cases. That is the cold, hard truth.

People have no choice now but to get out on the streets because the Government does not really care what happens with any votes in here. It does not really care what happens to the people who end up homeless. When a Government treats people like that, exactly as the landlords under British rule treated Irish people, which contributed very substantially to revolution in this country, it is time for people to get on the streets and fight back against this Government's cruel and callous disregard for the most basic thing which people should feel entitled to, namely, a secure place to live. They should not have their children facing the fear, anxiety and trauma of being made homeless and not even having a hostel to go to. That is what we are facing.

The Minister says we have all these mitigating schemes. We were the people who asked the Government to bring in a tenant in situscheme. I will give a list of some of the excuses for why these purchases are not happening. They are not happening if people are over-housed, which is when there are too many rooms in the house for the number of people. They are not happening when people are under-housed, where houses are overcrowded, because the State then says it could not possibly buy that house. It says it cannot possibly buy a house if people are in a housing assistance payment tenancy in a different constituency from the one where they are on the housing list. It could not buy a house if it is too expensive either or if people are over the social housing income threshold. People might go for a local authority home loan but be told they are in their late 50s, that houses are €300,000 or €400,000 in the area, and since they are 57 or 58, the most they will be given in a loan is €70,000 or €80,000. That is not much help. None of the schemes to mitigate against the cruel decision the Minister has now made will offer solutions to people who are facing the sword of homelessness coming down on their heads. Shame on the Minister. People should get out on the streets to give their answer to what he is doing tonight.

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