Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú) | Oireachtas source

Aontú has found through parliamentary questions and freedom of information requests that almost 400 people have died in homelessness on the streets of Dublin in the last five years. That is an incredible figure. The shocking thing is that the national figure is far higher but the Government refused to collect the data in any other county outside of Dublin. The figures I give today do not even count those who are rough sleeping in this country. Those statistics are far higher. Some 11,754 people throughout the State are currently homeless and more than 3,000 of them are children. Some of these children are spending their third St. Patrick's week in emergency accommodation. It has an enormous effect on them.It radically changes their lives. It damages their nutrition, their education, their mental health, their ability to develop friendships and their socialisation. The decision to delete the eviction ban will simply add more people to that homeless figure in the future. As we have this debate, many thousands of families live on the edge of eviction. They are petrified at the thought that the last protection for them is about to evaporate.

The numbers are stark, even in my own county. Right now there are 127 eviction notices in County Meath and 35 rental properties available in the whole of the county. There are no emergency accommodation beds in the local authority in County Meath at the moment. The Minister needs to do the maths. If he looks at the figures throughout the State, he will see that there were 4,741 notices to quit in the three months leading up to when the eviction ban was announced. There are 1,100 homes to rent in the whole of the State. The number of households threatened with eviction is four times greater than the number of existing houses to rent. That is extraordinary. There is no way to argue those figures away. They simply do not add up. People will have nowhere to go and no alternative. In many situations it is a ticking time bomb for people. The worst thing about this is that there is practically no contingency planning by the State at the moment to deal with the humanitarian crisis we are on the precipice of. It is a crisis that has been created by an actual decision of the Minister's Government. Some people will sofa-hop, some will go to their parent's box room, many people will sleep rough, and many people will overhold. There is no doubt about that.

Under Tusla guidelines, if a young family is homeless they must go to the local Garda station. The reason for that is because children are especially vulnerable and going to the Garda station seemingly offers some level of protection compared to what would otherwise be a place of no protection. The gardaí themselves are on the record as saying that Garda stations are not facilities to protect homeless families in this country.

Today the Government published a long amendment to the Sinn Féin motion. It is an amendment, but it is not law and it is not finance. Most of it is a reheating of unfulfilled pledges so far. None of it will be implemented in the ten days that are ticking down to the deletion of the eviction ban. Despite the Government's amendment, that crisis still looms large for those families over the next ten days. If the Government meant business, it would have carried out real reforms. Shockingly, there are 25,515 Airbnb short-term lets available today. The number of Airbnb lets available is 21 times the number of long-term lets available to families. It is extraordinary that the system designed by the Government means that tourists spend their time in homes and families spend their time in hotel rooms. The Government gifted a near-0% tax rate to many big international vulture funds in terms of rentals, but mom-and-pop rentals are taxed at the full level. There has been no effort to change that or to incentivise long-term leases by reducing the tax on those types of rental in the latter stages of long-term leases. The vacant property tax has still not been fully implemented by the Government despite all of the talk on that.

Aontú submitted an amendment to the Journal Office today. It seeks to put a little bit of compassion into the Government's approach to this particular crisis. The amendment "calls on the Government to make provisions to ensure that no person can be evicted if they fulfil any of the following criteria". The proposed criteria are as follows:

— if the tenant or a member of their family living in the relevant accommodation has a disability;

— if the tenant or a member of their family living in the relevant accommodation has a terminal illness, a cancer diagnosis, has suffered a stroke, has advanced heart disease or suffers from poor mental health;

— if the tenant or a member of their family living in the relevant accommodation is pregnant or has given birth in the last three years; and

— if the tenant or a member of their family living in the relevant accommodation is over the age of 65 years.

If backbench Deputies from Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Green Party vote against this amendment of compassion they are voting to allow for cohorts of people who are most vulnerable to be evicted in large numbers in the next while. We must remember that each individual Deputy is responsible for their vote. They are responsible for the material effect it will have on the people who will suffer directly as a result of their vote, so I urge Deputies from all parties to support this amendment.

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