I commend Deputy Ó Broin on bringing forward this motion. We clearly have a situation where rents and evictions are out of control in every part of the country and it is spiralling at an alarming rate. At the moment, I am dealing with a group of houses in my constituency in Enniscrone, Sonas. It is elder care accommodation beside a nursing home. Older people who live there have received eviction notices telling them they have to move out. They have nowhere to go. Some of them are on the council tenancy list, waiting to get into local authority houses. There are no local authority houses in that area or anywhere in Sligo for them to go to. Others are above the threshold because their pensions are slightly higher, with a couple living in a house and they also have nowhere to go. We are in a situation where the Government seems to have its eyes closed to the reality of ordinary people on the ground. In his speech, the Minister of State mentioned that there are no easy solutions, that the Government has a long-term plan to deal with this and that caps and trying to freeze rents will not solve anything. It would solve problems for the people who cannot afford their rent at the moment and for those facing eviction. There are thousands of them across the country. I am sure the Minister of State deals with them in his constituency in the same way as the rest of us do. Yet, for some reason, the only thing the Government is prepared to listen to on the housing situation are the corporate interests of the big landlord companies. They are the only ones who get any deal, who are sorted out in any way when it comes to all of this. The ordinary people who are trying their best to survive and manage are making no progress whatsoever with this Government when it comes to delivering housing. What we are calling for here is very clear: we need the Government to bring in a strategy whereby it caps rents, freezes rents and bans evictions so that people can have the security of knowing they will not be leaving their homes. If we do not do that, the 51% increase we see will be double that this time next year.

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