Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE) | Oireachtas source

Why are we, at the start of another Dáil term, debating something the House debated previously and passed, namely, our Bill? We are here again because the Government is deliberately blocking it. It is leaving the Bill in committee or not even progressing it to committee because the Government is opposed to the reintroduction of the eviction ban, despite the fact the Dáil passed this Bill to have a proper eviction ban to prevent people from being made homeless. At the root of that is the conscious decision of the Government to allow the number of homeless people in this State to rise higher and higher so landlords can maximise their profit. That is the essence of the decision the Government has made and which it looks like the Government is shamefully going to continue to make as we go into the winter.

We know there are now almost 13,000 homeless people in emergency accommodation, 4,000 of whom are children. These are the people in emergency accommodation. In addition to them we have to add those who are sleeping rough on our streets while the storm is approaching. We must also add those who are couch surfing and those living in vans, in cars and in tents in our parks. It is an absolute disgrace and it is a conscious political choice.

Yesterday the Taoiseach, in response to Deputy Boyd Barrett, argued that the last eviction ban did not work, and that homelessness increased and the number of people in emergency accommodation increased almost every month it was in situ. He said it just deferred homelessness and that it made a bad situation worse later. What he is saying is complete nonsense. The idea that deferring homelessness would be a bad thing and that it does not matter to people that they have a roof over their heads tonight, tomorrow night, next month or whenever is utterly bizarre. The idea that it made a bad situation worse is ridiculous. Yes, it is true that in the timeframe of the inadequate eviction ban, which is not the same as the eviction ban we propose, it did not reduce the number of people who were homeless and that the number of people in emergency accommodation rose during most of those months but it is disingenuous in the extreme by the Taoiseach because he knows the figures demonstrate that once the partial inadequate eviction ban was lifted the homeless figures began to rise at a much more rapid rate. It made a difference and reduced the number of people in emergency accommodation who were homeless. Now the Government has made a decision, and will stick to it by the looks of it, to allow more and more people to become homeless. It seems to think the political price of having 15,000 or 16,000 people homeless is worth paying as long as it means the market can continue to operate.

In the second quarter of this year 5,700 eviction notices were issued, which was approximately 1,000 more than were issued in the first three months when the partial eviction ban was in place. In the three months since the end of the partial eviction ban half of the single adults who became homeless said they had been evicted from rental accommodation. All of those people would have been spared homelessness if the Government had put an eviction ban in place. Thousands more will be spared homelessness if the Government accepts the motion and implements the eviction ban. We had 20,000 notices to quit issued this year before the start of July.

What is the Government's alternative to an eviction ban? It is tax breaks for landlords. This is the Government's alternative. The Government's alternative is to say that landlords should pay a lower rate of tax on passive income than their renters pay on the earned income they get for going out to work. It is scandalous and barefaced. The Government constructs a logic for it and I will demonstrate how there is no basis for it. People can see the reason the Government is doing it is because it represents the landlords. It is not a Government that represents renters or homeless people. The constructed argument by the landlord lobby is to say that landlords are fleeing the sector and that they are having such a difficult time they need to have tax breaks and pay a low rate of tax and that this will give stability to tenants. The truth is that record rents are being paid in this country. There is a record amount of money going from the pockets of ordinary people into the pockets of those who own multiple properties, in particular, of course, the big corporate landlords. In 2016 €3.1 billion was paid in rent. There was €4.7 billion paid in rent to private landlords in 2022. The average weekly rent has gone from €200 to €273. As Deputy Boyd Barrett has pointed out, rather than this idea that the private rental sector is getting smaller, it has got bigger. From 2016 to 2022 the number of occupied dwellings rented from a private landlord increased by 7% to more than 330,000. This is a manufactured argument to try to get some tax cuts so that landlords pay less tax than renters are asked to pay.

The alternative is extremely simple. If landlords want to exit the market, that is grand, there is no problem and it is not a crisis for anybody as long as the tenant gets to remain in situ. If landlords want to exit the market, the State should just buy the properties from them at market rate. The landlords will achieve what they want, which is that they want to exit the market and that is fine; the tenant will get security of tenure and get to become a council tenant; and the State will get the benefit of an asset from which it will earn rent and will stop someone from becoming homeless.

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