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

No matter how much the Government tries to spin it, this debate is happening because it has made the cruel and cold-hearted decision to allow thousands of people to be evicted from next Saturday. That includes workers, pensioners, sick people, women and - worst of all - children. Does the Government honestly believe that any child deserves to be evicted into homelessness? More than 4,000 children are homeless now, because it allowed them and their families to be evicted and thousands more will be evicted if this ban is lifted. It is absolutely immoral. The Government's narrative is that it will evict people in order to save them. It will actually be better for people if we allow them to be evicted into homelessness when there is nowhere to go. The fear, the trauma, the anxiety and the damage that is done to the mental well-being of those children and their families is shocking and for many of them it will be life-long. The Government is allowing that to happen and saying that it is somehow justified.

The Government then tries to blame the Opposition for populism, as the Government calls it. The responsibility for the beginning, middle and end of the housing disaster we are facing lies with Governments led by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. I say to Deputy Jim O'Callaghan that the reason for all of this is quite simple. It was due to the decision to stop building local authority housing and outsource it to private landlords and the simultaneous decision to set up the National Asset Management Agency, NAMA, and nationalise all the building land and sell it off - €40 billion worth of it - to vulture and cuckoo funds that are now charging extortionate rents and making a fortune from the housing misery of those children, those families, those working people.

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