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

By indicating the Government intends to vote against our motion seeking to reinstate the eviction ban for no-fault evictions, the Government - Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Green Party - has essentially said it is okay that thousands more, including families, individuals and children, will end up homeless and in emergency accommodation with all the trauma and suffering that involves. It is particularly disgusting and shameful when it comes to children.

The Government is doing that to children, saying it will allow that to happen on top of already record numbers of people suffering that trauma, 4,000 of whom are children, and indicating to others, more than 5,000 of whom in just the past three months have got notices to quit, and thousands of whom are children, that they will end up homeless and that the Government will not stop that. That is what the Government is saying, no matter which way you cut it: "We will allow that to happen." Shame on the Government.

The only answer to this is for the hundreds of thousands of people who are vulnerable to ending up homeless now, the renters and all those who are caught up in some way or another with this housing crisis, with unaffordable rents, unaffordable house prices, mortgage interest hikes, you name it, to get out on the streets before this budget on the cost-of-living protest. The protest will be centrally about this disastrous situation, the worst end of which is people being driven into homelessness, but there are also tens of thousands of others couch surfing or living in overcrowded conditions, with two or three generations living in the one home, and some people actually sleeping on the streets. The Government says it will allow this to happen because the landlords might be a bit upset and because we need a balance as regards the right of landlords to charge astronomical rents. People faced with a notice to quit are suffering hopelessness.

In my area yesterday 16 properties were available on Daft: there was one one-bedroom property available for €2,217 per month, a two-bed property for €2,658, a three-bed property for €2,883 and a four-bed property for - wait until you hear this - €6,229. What does that mean if you are a family working on a low or average income? You are absolutely screwed. You are going out contacting hundreds of people and it is a waste of time. You do not even get replies. The Government could resolve this to everybody's satisfaction if it were to simply say it will not let people be made homeless, that if the landlord has to sell then the Government will buy the property, but that the landlord will not be allowed to refuse to sell the property if the family would end up homeless.

This in my hand is a letter relating to one person and her child now facing an eviction in Stillorgan. The woman was told in May of this year that sale had been agreed on a tenant in situpurchase, and now she has received a letter a few months later stating, "Sorry, we have decided to pull out of it." There is no explanation. The landlord wants to sell to keep the tenant in situ. Obviously, the tenant and the family want to stay in situ. There is no explanation. "Sorry, we are not proceeding with it." Only a fraction of the expressions of interest for the tenant in situscheme - in our area, certainly - are actually happening.

It is very simple. The Government has the power to stop people ending up in homelessness and to work with the people who are in the shameful situation of being homeless and to get them out of it. It is choosing not to do so, however, because it is listening to property owners, landlords or whatever you want to call them who are making money out of others' housing misery. Shame on the Government.

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