The Minister of State is probably well aware of the significant concerns of a number of rights-based organisations working directly on housing on the front line, including the statutory body, IHREC, and others. I will outline what they have highlighted as some of the significant concerns about this Bill. I was not a Deputy during the previous Dáil term when this legislation went to the housing committee. I am looking at it from the perspective of someone who is coming new to these particular proposals. Stepping back and looking at it, I have serious questions. I asked the officials at the briefing what was the rationale for the introduction of these measures now. I would also ask what the rush is. We should give it the time it needs because there are serious concerns about it. Is there a reason the Minister for housing is not here? Is he otherwise engaged? I would have thought, given the significance of this legislation, which makes the biggest change to homeless legislation since the enactment of the 1988 legislation, that the Minister for housing would be here to explain why he is introducing these changes, completely separate from what had gone through pre-legislative scrutiny. My deep concern is that the changes around emergency accommodation are a knee-jerk reaction to try to somehow massage the figures for emergency accommodation. If that is not the case, why introduce it? If it is going to make no material change to the numbers, why is it being introduced? It is, of course, going to have an impact. Otherwise, the Government would not be introducing it. Therefore, it is clear that the Government is introducing a significant change to access to emergency accommodation in the middle of the worst homelessness crisis in this State. It is moving to remove access to homeless accommodation. Why is it doing that? It is doing it because it wants to reduce homelessness numbers to try to take the political heat out of the issue. Even worse is the alternative, which is that the Government is pandering to a rising anti-immigrant sentiment. I have serious political concerns that that is what this Bill is about. I am concerned that it is not actually about addressing housing or homelessness but is about being seen, just like the Minister for justice, to be engaged in performative acts of hardening a stance on immigration in order to pander to what we are seeing, which is rising anti-immigrant sentiment and rising racism. We saw the outcome of that in Belfast and we saw it in 2024 here. I have serious concern that the Government is not taking seriously the political impacts of introducing this, why it is introducing it and what messages it is sending out. This is not the start of this. The Taoiseach and the Tánaiste have been saying for months that homelessness is more complex and is linked to immigration. The Tánaiste, Deputy Simon Harris, said it himself that there are people in emergency accommodation who are not entitled to housing in this country. He said they do not have a right to housing here. Very clearly, this is being done in the context of that, to act on that to reduce the entitlements of access to emergency accommodation. What it is doing, and I will set out why, is making the most vulnerable people in this country, those who are homeless, pay for an absolute political failure to deal with a social and economic disaster of the housing crisis and homelessness. I am sure the Minister of State has seen that the organisations are calling for this to be paused. The Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission has written to the Minister, to the Minister of State and to the House this week asking for this to be paused. IHREC is the statutory human rights organisation in this country that the State is supposed to be abiding by. Is the Government going to ignore it? We also have the Irish Homeless Policy Group, which sets out very clearly its concerns. Whatever the Government thinks about listening or not listening to us, this is Focus Ireland, the Simon Communities of Ireland, Threshold, and the organisations that are working on the front line of homelessness. I will set out what the Irish Homeless Policy Group has written this week. It said that along with its key concerns with the proposed Bill, we also ask that members of the committee ensure that the proposed legislation does not in any way prevent access to emergency accommodation while matters relating to residency status are being adjudicated by local authorities. This includes Irish citizen households returning from abroad in crisis. The issue of how this legislation going to impact on returning Irish emigrants has also been raised. Focus Ireland, Threshold and the Simon Community are concerned that implementing this legislation could lead to an increase in rough sleeping and households being pushed into increasingly vulnerable situations. They say it is critical that families and individuals are provided with accommodation and supports while residency status is determined. The organisations working on the front line of homelessness are saying that this legislation could worsen homelessness. There needs to be a proper response to that to outline how this is not going to worsen homelessness. By that, we do not mean increasing numbers going into emergency accommodation. Of course, what happens if people are denied access to emergency accommodation is they are not counted as homeless. What we will see is a rise in hidden homelessness and in street homelessness - people sleeping in tents and on the streets as a result of these changes. Why would the Government do that? The organisations also outline something that has been mentioned already and that we would support, namely, the social housing appeals board. My understanding is that the previous housing committee recommended that the appeals board would not be within local authorities but would actually be an independent board. I ask the Minister of State to take on board that it is not best practice to develop an appeals mechanism. The appeals mechanism should be done through an organisation independent from local authorities. The Irish Homeless Policy Group and the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission, the Mercy Law Resource Centre all raise this issue of how these changes are going to impact on particularly vulnerable cohorts. They mention specifically victims of domestic violence and human trafficking and they highlight that the IHREC made a specific recommendation when this went through pre-legislative scrutiny. I am sure the Minister of State has that recommendation and is familiar with it but IHREC recommended that the "legislation should include exemptions from the habitual residence requirement for victims of trafficking and victims of domestic, sexual or gender-based violence." Again, I ask the Minister of State to include that as an amendment and to agree to that as a change because we cannot have a situation whereby we are introducing legislation that will mean that victims of trafficking, which we are obliged to support under international law we have signed up to, and victims of domestic, sexual and gender-based violence are going to be further marginalised, exposed and unsupported as a result of restricting access to social housing and emergency accommodation. It is absolutely essential that the Department and the Minister respond to that specific issue and outline how these changes are not going to result in this. IHREC also recommended that the legislation be amended to ensure that the five years' reckonable residency requirement does not apply specifically to the victims of trafficking in a manner that is contrary to the EU anti-trafficking directive. The other recommendation was that discretion be given to local authorities to provide social housing supports to these vulnerable cohorts. I have been working for a long time in the area of housing specifically and the right to housing, and one of the issues that has come up is the 1988 Act and issues around it. Indeed, I wrote a research report specifically on it when I was in Maynooth. One of the criticisms by the likes of the Mercy Law Resource Centre, the community law centre and those working directly with people trying to access emergency accommodation was that there was no actual requirement on local authorities to provide emergency accommodation and that local authorities were constantly trying to find reasons not to provide it. People who come to my constituency office, and I am sure the Minister of State has it as well, would often say the local authority asked them if there was some couch they could sleep on or if there were parents they could go to as there was no emergency accommodation available. Local authorities would also ask about this issue of local connection and would refuse people access to emergency accommodation, or try to find ways to refuse people access to emergency accommodation, in part because they simply do not have the emergency accommodation. The organisations also highlighted that discrimination was taking place against particular vulnerable groups, be they Travellers, Roma or migrants, by local authorities and that these organisations were constantly having to advocate. That is part of the work of the likes of the Mercy Law Resource Centre and in my own constituency, the northside community law centre, and Community Law and Mediation. They do a lot of that work trying to advocate on behalf of people to be able to access emergency accommodation. These organisations are deeply concerned that these changes are going to make it even harder for people and therefore we are going to see more people put into hidden homelessness. The Mercy Law Resource Centre highlighted in its letter this week - as did Deputy Ó Broin - our concern, along with the concern of those organisations at the speed in which the Government is pushing this through. I asked at the outset why the rush? What is the rush about this? Why are we not taking time to go through this, given the considerations? The Mercy Law Resource Centre and others have significant concerns that the urgency in pushing the Bill through fails to allow time to give it full consideration and to investigate any potential unintended consequences. The centre states it is striking that the Bill fails to give consideration again to the victims of trafficking who may have difficulty satisfying the new habitual residence test. Similarly, it argues that a person returning to Ireland in crisis may have difficulty proving habitual residence and that we need only look at the recent actions of immigration officials in other jurisdiction to see the impact this could have. It said those were merely two examples that jumped out to it from an initial reading of the Bill. The centre also outlined something that needs to be answered. IHREC has asked about this as well and it was also brought up in relation to the pre-legislative scrutiny. It is that the Bill may fail to comply with EU law, especially as it relates to the requirement that all members of a household must satisfy the habitual residence requirement. There is also the issue of EU nationals who are working here and the three-month period. The Irish Homeless Policy Group highlights a concern about the rights of EU workers, who are here with their families and children, to access services within the first three months. The group outlines – and I request an answer specifically on this – that this may be a contravention of EU Regulation No. 492/2011, contrary to the European Court of Justice, and that the fundamental rights of Irish and EU citizen children under Article 20 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union will be contravened by this Bill. This is set out in Directive 2004/38/EC, which sets out that EU worker households and their family members are specifically protected from the application of the rule that can otherwise bar access to state supports in the first three months of residence. They are also guaranteed equal treatment and non-discrimination under Articles 7 and 9. I ask that this be addressed. Before I move to the issue of the slip rule and the Residential Tenancies Act, I again express my deep concern about the way in which this Bill has been brought forward, the discussion of it, the framing of it and the adding in of the emergency accommodation restriction. The introduction of the best interests of the child should be positive and welcome. I have consistently made the point that children are quite invisible within homeless services and in the crisis of homelessness. We do not fully count how many children go through emergency accommodation and present as homeless, and we have not fundamentally accepted the deeply damaging impact on children of spending time in emergency accommodation. The Minister of State's party, Fine Gael, as well as Fianna Fáil, have stood over this homelessness crisis. We have now been at it for over 12 years, since 2014. It is galling to hear the Tánaiste in an interview talk about the housing crisis being an "emergency" and how he is so frustrated things just are not moving. Fine Gael has been in power for 15 years and homelessness has risen year after year and then the Minister of State gets up and talks about how the Government's big move on homelessness is to restrict access to emergency accommodation. It is not right. The Government's big action should be to introduce a ban on evictions to stop people being made homeless. Its priorities are all wrong. It is playing into a dangerous politics and it is deeply disappointing to see it being brought forward in this way, and cynical as well. I have significant concerns about the Residential Tenancies Act and the slip rule being applied to statutory declarations. This will also lead to a further increase in evictions and a reduction in the right of tenants to be to challenge illegal notices to quit. This should not be applied to statutory declarations. Similarly, the length of time required for notification of hearings is too short. Tenants need a longer period to prepare their information, book time off work and arrange childcare. It also raises the issue that it is always down to tenants to try to challenge illegal evictions and the idea that our rental systems and its tenant protections are based on tenants having to spend a huge amount of time contacting the RTB and presenting to it. What should be in place is much stronger legal protection for tenants from evictions and rent hikes, but of course the Government is unwilling to do that.

Sentiment score: -0.09