Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

At the very centre of this legislation is a simple fact: in three days' time, because of the decisions of the Government, very many people, adults and children, will become lose the rental properties in which they have been living. The Government has put in place no credible plan to ensure that they have somewhere safe to go. I listened carefully to the Minister and the Minister of State, and I want to respond to each of the claims they made.

The Taoiseach stated earlier today that people will be able to get other rental properties. For seven years straight, the private rental sector has shrunk. We are losing about 7,000 private rental sector properties every single year under this Government. It is simply not the case that people can go and find other rental properties. In fact, one of the most dishonest things the Taoiseach said is that there were thousands of new rental tenancies registered last year. We have a thing called annual registration. Every tenancy has to be reregistered annually and the Taoiseach knows this. We also heard that people could present for emergency accommodation.

We are talking to directors of housing and homeless services across the State who are telling us that even with the additional capacity provided by the cold weather initiative, it is at breaking point and will very soon be full. It may even be full before we get into April. We are told we have a target of 1,300 tenant in situhomes - it is not even 1,500 - and that the scheme is working. Unless the rules underpinning that scheme are changed, as we heard from the County and City Management Association and the Department at a meeting on the Joint Committee on Housing, Local Government and Heritage only a week ago, the Government is not going to meet those targets.

I hope it does, and I hope it exceeds them. Given that the Minister has not met a single one of his social and affordable housing targets to date, however, I will not hold my breath.

We are told that tenants can have first refusal to purchase their homes. Please look at the income of the vast majority of private renters; they could not afford to buy the homes if they were made available to them. The legislation underpinning this scheme is not yet in place. The Minister of State misspoke during when he suggested that it would be in place in April, as well as the administrative scheme for cost-rental. That is not what the Minister said earlier and the legislation is not even drafted. Then, the Minister of State talked about the cost-rental option being in place on an administrative basis from the end of this week. The approved housing bodies have not been talked to and they do not know how that scheme is going to work, nor do local authorities, nor do tenants. Given the fact it took a year to get the tenantin situscheme for social housing even beginning to see any purchases, I suspect something similar will happen with this.

The Minister of State said something very interesting. He indicated that it is the public out there who are becoming homeless. He kind of got that wrong. It is the public out there that he and his colleagues are making homeless by lifting this key protection. Over and over again, we have said this is not the core issue. The emergency ban on evictions is only to give the Government breathing space. Contrary to what the Government said both last October and three weeks ago, I set out in a very detailed memo form to the senior Minister the actions that we needed to take during an extended ban on evictions to reduce the pressure on singles and families going into emergency accommodation, to get people out of emergency accommodation more quickly, to increase and accelerate the delivery of social and affordable homes and to use the emergency procurement of planning powers that the Government has at its fingertips but that it is refusing to use in order to combine vacant and derelict properties and new building technologies to generate an additional volume of social and affordable homes above the existing targets to get people out of homelessness. These are things it could have done over the past five months that it has refused to do and that it is not going to do in the time ahead.

The other thing that beggars belief is that Minister after Minister comes in and tells us the plan is working. Yet, not just over the past five or six months, but over the past two and a half years of this Government and seven years of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael in government together, what are the facts? They are house prices at record highs and continuing to rise, rents at record highs and continuing to rise, the private rental sector contracting, homelessness increasing and the Government not meeting its social and affordable housing targets, targets that are too low to begin with.

What do we need? We need this crucial protection to be passed, we need the Labour Party’s no-confidence motion in the Government to pass tomorrow and we need a general election. We cannot just keep going on with decade after decade of failed Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael housing policies, failed Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael housing Ministers and ordinary working people having to live with the very real consequences of their decisions. For anybody watching this debate, all they have heard from the Government is that it is going to make them homeless from this Friday, this Saturday and this Sunday. Shame on the Government. This Bill is crucial. This Bill should be passed. I commend it to the House.

See this speech in context