Fintan Warfield (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I will speak to amendment No. 9. The Government promised to introduce no-fault evictions. When a person signs a tenancy agreement there is usually an understanding that there are X amount of people in Y number of rooms. Family size can change. A person can have a partner or children, adult children can move home and so on. The overcrowding provision is where a landlord can issue a notice to quit if the property no longer meets the needs of the household. This particularly disadvantages families with large numbers of children, including Traveller and Roma families and families who have been waiting a long time for social housing. If we allow larger families to be evicted, they are the folks who end up spending the longest periods in emergency accommodation, so much so that in 2020 the Minister gave local authorities the power to buy one-bedroom and four-bedroom vacant properties in order to move single people and large families out of emergency accommodation. If a large family ends up in emergency accommodation, it takes a very long time to find suitable accommodation for them. Why are we subjecting families to this?

My other concern is that this provision could become a loophole for a small number of landlords who see that they need a loophole. If landlords cannot evict tenants because they want to sell the house, they could evict them for overcrowding, even if the household has one person too many. I appeal to the Government to support amendment No. 9. The small provision in the Bill could result in large families being evicted into homelessness or trapped in homelessness for long periods of time, for which there is evidence.