Noel Ahern (Dublin North West, Fianna Fail)

No. I will come to that point. We are talking about the private rented sector at present. If a tenant is unruly or guilty of anti-social behaviour, the complaint will go to the board. If the board finds the tenant guilty, it can ask him or her to leave. Senator Hayes will be aware that very often the problem in local authority estates was that local authorities had the power to follow up and chase tenants. Since the mid-1990s, they had powers to issue exclusion orders and so on. I do not have the statistics on how many of them worked. I have seen cases being dealt with satisfactorily in the courts. However, some local authority officials who pursued cases through the courts have been frustrated as a result of exclusion orders which may exclude Joe Soap for 300 yards, which may be meaningless. One needs to be excluded from, for example, Clondalkin, Finglas, Tallaght or wherever. The regulation is working well, but there is frustration that some of the judgments have not been sensible.

There has been a problem with people who claimed to be tenant-purchasers whom we could not touch. I have been examining this aspect to see what could be done. The matter has been examined by the Attorney General and his ruling is included in the section, which extends the interim excluding order provisions of the 1997 Act to occupants of tenant purchase houses. It also extends the local authority's power to refuse to sell a house to persons likely to engage in anti-social behaviour under the affordable and shared ownership scheme. It is not as satisfactory as we might have expected. It allows local authorities to pursue and take out exclusion orders against occupants of a tenant purchase house, not the owner. The father and mother might be the owners, but the occupants could be anyone else in the house, including adult sons or daughters, visitors or friends. It allows exclusion orders to be extended to the occupants of tenant purchase houses. It does not relate to affordable and shared ownership houses; it just allows local authorities to refuse to sell affordable or shared ownership houses to these people.

There is one proviso. We are talking about estates, which include a mix of local authority rented houses and tenant purchase houses. The local authority must have some interest in rented local authority houses in the estate. This power cannot be used in estates in places like Tallaght, which was developed in the late 1960s, where everyone has bought out the houses. The local authority must have an involvement with some rented accommodation. I am pleased with the advances that have been made. Ownership confers certain rights but it gives local authorities the right to bring in tenant purchasers and put them on notice. Up to now local authorities believed they could do nothing about tenant purchasers. They could have a chat with them, but if they told the local authority to go to hell, it could do nothing about it.