Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank everybody who spoke on the legislation, especially those who supported it. After three years of the Minister of State's Government being in office, the homelessness crisis has never been worse. That is a blatant, blunt fact. Each month it gets worse. New records are broken every single month by this Government when it comes to homelessness. As shocking as these new records are, they mask the real impact of homelessness on workers and families, on their financial resilience, on their mental health and on their relationships.

Crucially, the impact on children was mentioned a lot in this debate. Children are deprived of security, deprived of comfort and deprived of the freedom to have a place they can call home. I am a father of four children and I would go through a wall for my child. I think about the many families who have been let down by the Minister of State's Government - by this State - who find themselves in emergency accommodation month after month with the numbers continuing to increase, while Government Members are going to march in here and vote to allow people be evicted over Christmas. Where is the compassion from the Government? The Minister of State should look around the empty benches where his Government colleagues should be. The Minister for housing should be here to listen to colleagues debating this issue. We could fill this Chamber 25 times over with just the children who are in emergency accommodation, just the children who will wake up on Christmas Day without a place to call home.

We are trying to put forward solutions, through the legislation, that will ban no-fault evictions. Even the British at the time of the Great Famine, the Great Hunger, had more compassion than the Minister of State’s Government is showing, because they introduced legislation that did not allow evictions to happen at Christmas. We heard from other speakers that this is the norm in other European countries across the Continent. Those countries have rental systems far bigger than ours, far more vibrant than ours and which get investment more than ours, but there is an understanding and a compassion there that you should not be evicting people at Christmas. There are children who are not just going to spend their first Christmas Day in emergency accommodation, nor their second, but their third and in some cases their fourth. That is how appalling the record of this Government on housing and homelessness is. That is on the Minister of State’s watch. It is on Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Green Party’s watch.

We heard many individuals’ stories during the debate. In my county there is a mother of three who has recently been diagnosed with cancer. She has an eviction notice. She does not know where she is going to go after Christmas. She has no idea. There is no dedicated emergency accommodation in the municipal districts of Glenties, Lifford and Donegal town. This young lady currently has nowhere else to go. She faces a Christmas of uncertainty and a winter of despair. This legislation could help her and the hundreds of others like her and give them the comfort of knowing they will not be evicted at Christmas because the legislation Sinn Féin has brought forward through Deputy Ó Broin will guarantee they will not be evicted before the end of March.

In combination with that, the Government needs to ramp up the type of social housing and cost rental housing we require. The stories the Minister of State heard articulated by my colleagues and those on the Opposition benches are not stories from a Victorian novel or Charles Dickens’s tales, but the lived realities of people across this State. Where is the Minister of State’s compassion? I ask every TD in here where their compassion is. They should not vote for people to be evicted at Christmas. We have legislation here that works in other European jurisdictions. It is the least we should do. When this State - this Government - has failed those families over and over again by not providing alternative accommodation, let us ensure there is room in the inn. Let us ensure they are not evicted at Christmas.

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