Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

A number of years ago, the Department that occupies the Custom House enacted laws that enabled it to ban bedsits in Dublin. There was a four-year lead-in period for this to take place. Eventually, bedsits became illegal. They were defined as accommodation where there was any question of having to share kitchen or bathroom facilities in any building. The result of the edict from the Custom House was that between 8,000 and 12,000 dwellings in Dublin were declared illegal. The consequence was that many people who were quite happy in bedsits, some of which were of reasonable quality, although they were modest since facilities had to be shared, were effectively evicted by their landlords. All the housing stock was changed.As a result, many houses were put up for sale at a time when the market was poor, people were evacuated from those houses and all of that additional potential housing stock was eliminated.

The same Department has come up with a number of housing plans since then, but it has had little success in implementing social housing, affordable housing or whatever, because it deputes most of this activity to the local authorities. All of that is bad enough and is a colossal chapter of ineptitude going back to 2009, but I am most concerned about the increasing number of stories about the standards of accommodation which are legal but totally unconscionable. There are stories of little box bedrooms with four bunks are being occupied by adults or of people working shifts to share a single bed. This kind of slum landlordism is apparently permissible. No real effort is made to inspect rented premises to see whether there are triple bunks in small rooms or rooms with six or eight people living in what is effectively a squalid dormitory. This is going on day in, day out in our capital city. The local authorities and the Department, which were so keen to close down bedsits in 2009, have not lifted a finger to assist with decent living standards in this city.

I appreciate that it is a complex problem, but inspection is not complex. It requires people knocking on doors and asking to see what is happening in the premises. In the RTÉ documentary, there was one premises in Crumlin which was a shocking example. We are expected to believe this all stopped because of that documentary, but I do not believe for a minute that it stopped. People are being exploited and gouged to live in these conditions, and the Department based in the Custom House is doing nothing to ensure that it stops. I ask the Leader to invite the Minister, Deputy Eoghan Murphy, to the House to explain precisely what he is doing to enforce even remotely decent housing standards in this city.