Mattie McGrath (Tipperary, Independent) | Oireachtas source

We are used to Ministers running out before we speak. It is total disrespect but they cannot face the truth. The real truth is that this Government has failed miserably in all of its plans to build houses. We have had scheme after scheme rolled out. We have had this promise, that promise and the other promise, but nobody believes it.

All of it is fake news. It is blunder and bluff, as I have said before, from the Minister. We are going back to the Rambo days with the bluff and blunder. If that could build houses, they would be mushrooming up everywhere.

I have no faith in the motion Sinn Féin has brought forward. The people outside are frankly sick and tired of what is going on. The Gallery would be full tonight if people had any interest in this phoney debate between two groups of people who want to play politics with people's lives, with roofs over people's heads and with everything else. It is most distasteful.

Our group, the Rural Independent Group, has tabled a number of amendments to try to give solace to people and to have fair play between tenants and the small house owners who want to rent out their houses. I will not call them landlords because they are ordinary people. Some of them are accidental landlords, some of them are incidental landlords and some of them have made huge investments of money on which they paid tax to buy a property for a rental scheme. The parties of the left here demonise and attack them gach lá as if they were evil land-grabbing people, going back to the days of the Peep o' Day boys and the Whiteboys, as if they were like that. They are decent people. We have seen how tens of thousands of them have left the market because it is not viable to be there any more.

The Government has got advice from the Attorney General. I accept that.

People must have destiny over their own property. I know people in Australia who want to come back and move into their houses but they cannot because they cannot get the tenants out. It is not all one side or the other side here. Fair play is a fine thing by me, but there is not much fair play in what goes on here. There is plenty of talk. If the left and the hard left had their way, they would take the houses off the people who own them - big houses, with people who pay the owners to live in them - and they would have nothing left to live in.

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