I move amendment No. 2: In page 5, between lines 29 and 30, to insert the following: "(2) Within three months of the coming into operation of this act the Minister shall produce a report into the affordability of current rents and establish a board to reset rents to affordable levels, where the guideline for establishing affordability will be rents that are, in general, no more than 20 per cent of a tenant’s income. (3) Within three months of the coming into operation of this act the Minister shall produce a report into the establishing of a principle that the rights of a tenant shall not be affected by the size or type of the landlord and/or the date of the tenancy commencement. (4) Within three months of the coming into operation of this act the Minister shall produce a report aimed at establishing the principle of preventing "no fault" evictions.". The best place to be to respond to the Government's Bill probably is with the protestors assembling outside Leinster House. The Bill will make an already dire housing crisis even worse by allowing landlords charging extortionate rents that are unaffordable for huge numbers of people to reset those rents to even higher levels. It beggars belief that the Government is doing this unless one remembers that it is not really representing the interests of the people affected by the crisis but, rather, is representing the interests of those profiteering on the backs of the housing misery of others. There can be no other explanation for what the Government is doing with this Bill. My amendment No. 1 sought, in essence, to stop the Bill until the Government had looked at what its impact would be on the affordability of rents, had addressed the issue of no-fault evictions and had a plan to make rents affordable. In the absence of that amendment, which was ruled out of order, amendment No. 2 seeks to force the Government to do those things in the aftermath of passing the Bill. Of course, I do not believe the Government is in any way serious about addressing those issues, whether before, during or after the Bill is passed, because if it were, it would not have introduced the Bill in the first place. However, for the sake of form, let us rehearse the Government's argument. It is like the argument made by the US military during the Vietnam War that it needed to bomb villages to save them. The Government is saying that to reduce rents, it must increase them. It is perverse Orwellian logic. Rents must be allowed to be reset to even more unaffordable levels because somehow, by magic, that will make them go down at some point in the future. There is no evidence, ever or anywhere, of that happening. This is market dogma of the absolutely worst kind. The reason the Government is not bothered that it makes no sense whatsoever is that, in fact, the Bill will do what the Government really wants it to do, which is to further enrich property speculators, investors and corporate landlords. My view is that Members of the Dáil who are landlords should recuse themselves from this debate and should not vote on the Bill. It is absolutely unconscionable that we have a proposal that will jack up already unaffordable rents to even more unaffordable levels and that people in here who vote for it might benefit financially from it. That is outrageous. There is a disproportionate number of landlords among the Members from the Government parties of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael and among some of the Independent Members backing up the Government. The number is disproportionate in the context of the political parties in the Dáil and in terms of broader representation in society. Beyond the question of people financially benefiting, we have a Government that believes the nonsense that somehow property investors will solve the housing crisis. I kind of cannot believe it. The reason we have a housing crisis is because the entire housing sector was handed over by the State to property investors after the crisis of 2008 to 2009. Cherrywood, in my area, as the biggest residential development in the entire country and one of the biggest in Europe, offers a pretty good test case of housing policy. At the point when that development was taken over by the National Asset Management Agency, NAMA, and thereby nationalised and brought into public ownership, it could have been developed by the State to deliver social and affordable housing. Instead, Governments led by Fine Gael and subsequently Fianna Fáil decided to hand it to property investors. The consequence of this was that for quite a few years, those investors sat on the development because it was more profitable to do that than to build houses. We were actively seeking at the time for those houses to be built. We were not objecting; we were asking that they be built. However, the investors sat and waited for the value of those properties to go up and the housing crisis to get worse. Then they started to flip them to other property developers. Mel Reynolds said to me at the time that Hines probably made a profit on Cherrywood before a single brick was laid. It made profit from speculating on zoned land. What prices are being charged for the houses and apartments Hines eventually started to build there? The houses are going for €600,000 and €700,000, which is unaffordable for the vast majority of people. The rents being charged are €2,000, €2,500, €3,000 and €3,500 a month, which are likewise unaffordable for the vast majority of people. These homes will end up being owned by big property investment funds, large international pension funds and so on, which will charge these extortionate rents. Now the Government wants a reset in order that even higher rents can be charged. By the way, the developer does not want to build the town centre that is needed by the community because it cannot make as much profit out of doing so. That is where this stuff leads. The Government thinks these people will reduce rents as a consequence of allowing them to reset those rents upwards. It is absolute nonsense. This Government measure will increase investor profits, make rents even more unaffordable and lead to increased speculation. It will do nothing to reduce rents. In fact, it will do worse than nothing in that it will exacerbate the housing crisis. All of this extraordinary action is supposedly justified on the basis there will be some greater protection and security for tenants by way of the six-year rule. The problem with that is if rents are unaffordable and if people can still be evicted for not being able to pay the rent, which will be allowed to happen, then the likelihood of not being able to pay an unaffordable rent and therefore getting evicted is a lot higher. Some 60,000 to 70,000 tenancies end on a voluntary basis or just end. That means almost all tenancies - 60,000 to 70,000 a year - will end over a period of about a decade. That means all rents very quickly will be unaffordable. In Dublin, the average rent is €2,100 and they will all go up to the level of what is advertised on daft.ie. If we go on daft.ie and look for something now, they are €2,500, €3,000 and €3,500. All rents will be up to that level. There will be dramatic increases and that will happen all over the country, exacerbating the housing crisis and driving more people into homelessness because there is literally nowhere for them to go that is affordable. That is what is going to happen. I will mention a couple of other consequences of all of this. People who are on HAP will potentially get a double hit on all of this. Many of the people who are on HAP are paying top-up payments to the private landlord, and the HAP levels, inadequate as they are, are not adjusted for rent increases. Therefore, if your landlord increases the rent and you are on HAP, the top-up you have to pay is even more. Huge numbers of people are in serious trouble due to the top-ups they are having to pay because they are also paying a council-based rent and council rents are now going up as well. There is a change in Dublin city. They are moving now to increase rents in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown. It is being done in different ways in different places, but across the country local authority rents are going up as well. Some of the most vulnerable people will get a double hit because of what the Government is doing, driving even more people into homelessness and crisis situations. On the protection of tenancy thing, there is a loophole I guarantee will be exploited by the landlords now for those tenants where there is a little bit of nominally greater protection because of the six-year thing, though it is also possible now. That loophole comes into play if the house, the residence, is not suitable to the person's need. Do you know that means? It means a tenant can get evicted for their rental property being overcrowded. If a person with no kids then has a child, or a person has another child, the residence is now not suitable to their needs because they need a bigger place. A landlord can say, "Sorry, I am evicting you because there are more people in the house than there was when I signed the lease to put you in." That will be allowed for under the legislation. They will find ways to do that. Do these corporate landlords do that kind of thing? Oh they absolutely do. I have the living proof in a multi-unit development called St. Helen's Court which is across the road from my constituency office in Dún Laoghaire. I do not know how many times I have raised it. Eight or nine years later, the majority of the units, all of them perfect units, are sitting there empty since it was taken over by a vulture fund and then another vulture fund which tried to mass-evict the tenants. It eventually drove them out. We successfully resisted some of the attempts to evict people but eventually, with the grind of being threatened constantly with eviction and having to go to the RTB, people just left. Some of the people did get housed by the council. The majority of those properties continue to sit there empty because it suits the vulture fund for them to be empty in order that it can get beyond the existing legislation's restrictions on rent increases, eventually jack up the rents again and get around the existing RPZs. That is what they do. The landlords play the long game. They inflict misery on the tenants. They try to evict people, eventually drive them out and sit on the properties, in this case for nearly a decade. It is perfectly empty when there are people homeless on the street outside. They do this because it is profitable to do it and the Government allows that. It is absolutely shocking and now the Government is going to facilitate even further that sort of profiteering. There is a lot more to be said and I am sure my colleagues here will be saying many of those things but this is a disgrace. The best place for people who are worried about the housing crisis to be is out protesting. I hope we see more protests against this because the Government has really revealed its true colours on this one and we need to fight back. People who want something done about this housing crisis and who want to get affordable rents, secure and affordable housing and to protect tenants' rights need to begin to get organised on the streets.
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Yes.
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I could name a few Ministers before him.
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I really am furious at the Minister's comments that this debate is about social media clips. It diminishes the seriousness of what is at stake here. I have been a Member of this House since 2011. I was here two or three months when a circular was produced by the then Department of the environment, within which responsibility for housing was a matter for a Minister of State rather than having a Ministry in its own right. That was because we did not then have the homelessness and housing crisis we have now. The need for housing to come under a senior Ministry arose from the housing crisis that commenced a few years later. There was no fanfare and no press releases from the then Fine Gael-Labour Party in respect of the circular of 2011. It basically said the Government was stopping direct capital investment in public housing and would instead outsource its provision. The word "HAP" did not appear at that point but it was the beginning of the idea. RAS was in place at the time but HAP had not yet arrived. I remember putting out a press release and holding a press briefing, which only one journalist attended. I tried to explain that the Government was proposing, in effect, to do away with the direct provision of social housing and that this would be a disaster. I remember when HAP was introduced during the term of the then Minister of State, Jan O'Sullivan. The debate in this House went on for hours as we tried to explain why the scheme was going to be a disaster because it would replace social housing provision by the State with outsourcing of provision to the private sector. Of course, that turned out to be the case. The other big feature of that policy was the then Minister for Finance, Michael Noonan, meeting with representatives of the vulture funds that were invited in to buy up all the distressed property. It was a deliberate policy. He met with people from 65 or so vulture funds in 2013 and basically asked them to take over all the distressed property in the hands of NAMA. We said it would be a disaster. For a brief while, the then Government had the housing sector in its hands. If it had started building public and affordable housing then instead of doing the exact opposite, we would not be in this mess at all. It had the assets and so on. A point worth making regarding foreign private investment is that the houses that are built are built by labour in this country. When talking about capital from abroad, all the money is digits on a computer screen but the homes are built on land here, by people here and with materials sourced here. Those people are either building stuff that is affordable, like social and affordable housing, or they are building to make a profit, which is what is happening at the moment. What they are building is unaffordable. Of course, they are building hotels and things like that as well because it is profitable to do so. Forgetting about all the digital figures floating around, there is a finite amount of labour, land and materials, regardless of whether it is being used to build affordable and social housing or to build something else. It was often not doing anything at all because, for periods of time, the people who controlled the land, the labour and the capital decided they would not build anything until it was profitable enough to do so, and that is what they did. A lot of the people who got the distressed assets from NAMA at a discount price sat on them or leaked the stuff very slowly. This is a very important point that the Minister needs to understand. Never, ever, are the investors he is looking to court, lure and incentivise here going to build to the point that their profits go down. Why would they? At the point at which they think their profits are going to go down, they are going to stop. That is what they will do. The idea that we will get to a magical point somewhere where rents and house prices go down somehow is just total fantasy. The only instance of that is a massive crash. That is what we actually got the last time we had this mad policy of dancing to the investors' tune. It never really stopped but the dire crash of 2008 resulted from this madness of doing what they tell the Government. Then the housing crisis ensued. At that time, for example, it was unknown, for me in Dún Laoghaire and for most people in the country, to have families with kids in emergency accommodation. It just never happened. There was a particular profile to people who were in emergency accommodation. They were often very vulnerable. You did not have families with kids in homeless accommodation when I first came into the Dáil. Now, it is absolutely normalised and it will increase because of this. Then, the Minister comes forward with a Bill and says, to use his own words, "We do not want rents for long-term tenancies to fall behind market rents". That is the purpose of this Bill. Under no circumstances must we have low rents. That is what the Minister is saying.
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The Minister said, "We do not want rents for long-term tenancies to fall behind market rents".
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That means low rents are intolerable; we have to have them higher.
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That is in plain English. Just in case there was any doubt about the motive, at the beginning of this year, the Minister, Deputy Lawless, when discussing the Government's thinking, said: ... housing is about international markets. It is actually a spreadsheet in Zurich, New York or Antwerp, more so than a builder looking at a site in Longford or Roscommon, that is actually deciding what happens here. The point is, it should be the builder in Roscommon or Dublin or wherever it is, looking at the land we have that is zoned, available, serviced and so on. They should be looking at the labour we have available and saying we need houses for the people in this community, so let us build them. If we could do it in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s on a pretty big scale, when the country was virtually a third-world country, we can certainly do it now with enormous budget surpluses and record economic growth. If we look at the Central Bank figures on wealth, I think household wealth in this country is €1.3 trillion now, with about half of it sitting in the banks. The credit unions were banging down the Government's door for years saying they had €4 billion or €5 billion they were willing to put into housing, no problem. On the idea that we do not have suggestions, People Before Profit produced a policy document a few years ago titled, A State Construction Company. Two other parties have similar views on a State construction company. Let us build on the land we have and employ people directly. Rather than them building unaffordable stuff, let us have them build affordable stuff. It is unbelievable what the Government is doing with this Bill in terms of the position of tenants. I would defy any tenant at the end of this to know what sort of tenant they are. Are they a tenant of a big landlord or of a small landlord? Are they a student tenant? There are different rules for them. Are they a tenant post-March 2026 or pre-2026? Even for pre-2026 tenants, there is a different demarcation depending on whether the tenancy is from before or after 2022. We are going to have great fun trying to figure out even what sort of tenants we are talking about and what position they are in. The landlords, however, will know there is an incentive to get these tenants out so they can reset the rents up to the highest possible level. That will mean going on daft.ie and seeing if they can find three rents at €2,500, €3,000, or whatever price. That will be the result of all this. What are we saying? We are saying rents should be based on the ability of people to pay. We are saying people should not be evicted when they have done nothing wrong or, for that matter, as is the case now for lots of people, because they cannot afford unaffordable rents. People should not be evicted for not being able to afford unaffordable rents when more than €24,000 in after-tax income is required to pay the average rent in Dublin now. This is after-tax income, so €33,000 or €34,000 gross of a renter's income has to go to pay an average rent in Dublin. What are we talking about there? It is more than 50% of average earnings. If people cannot pay that, and in many cases it is much higher than that, is it their fault if they get evicted? It is not really, is it? It is the Government's fault that it has let rents go up to that level. Is what we are saying when we say keep rents down to particular levels really so off the charts that nobody else is doing it? Just to be clear, we want to reset rents downward, not just freeze them. I will mention four cities where rent control works. Vienna has a system of rent ceilings so rents cannot be put above a certain level. Some 43% of all the housing in Vienna is social housing and it has hard limits on rent increases. They have rents per square metre which are a fraction of ours - about a third of what people are paying here on average. In Stockholm, a renters' union negotiates the rents on a regular basis with the landlords, rent controls are used to set price ceilings and rents are set based on the utility value of the property. Without those rent controls, it is estimated that rents would be 68% higher in Stockholm than they currently are. Where else has rent controls? Barcelona has them. Rent increases are limited and they have ceilings and so on. Rent controls work there, and Berlin also has rent controls. The things we are proposing, and propose time and again, can be and are done elsewhere. The Government just does not want to do it because it and the landlords find it difficult that they cannot put rents up to the highest possible level. It, therefore, wants to pass legislation that will ensure landlords can do so, despite the housing misery that is causing for people. I think about the families who come in to me - I am sure they must come in to the Minister - saying it is their second year in emergency accommodation and they have been told they are 200th on the housing list. There is no chance of them getting a council house for at least seven or eight years. They are told to go out and find a HAP property. That means finding a property within the homeless HAP rate. They might be allowed to look for something for, say, €2,000 a month. No such thing exists. Imagine how hopeless people feel. They are told to go out and find something within that limit but it does not actually exist out there. Now, the Government is going to make that even more hopeless because people will be looking for rents of €2,500 or €3,000 a month, putting them in an even more hopeless position. For those few people who got a HAP tenancy but are paying a top-up - if they are on a social housing list, they would have to pay a top-up to get a HAP tenancy these days - this has already put them in a difficult position and it is threatening to drive them into arrears at any time. If there are any difficulties in their situation, any extra costs come in for kids or anything like that, they could easily find themselves in difficulty, but now those rents are going to go up. Almost certainly, the HAP rates will not go up to match that. Even if they do, it just means the State is now paying for it. Anyway, they will not go up to the level, so they will be in even more difficulty paying these unaffordable rents. That means they are going to get into trouble, people are going to get into arrears and they are going to get evicted as a result. That is what is actually going on. I do not know how the Minister can possibly justify this. The reason we are here, angry and talking about it is not because we want a social media clip. It is because, next week and in the months after, we are going to have to deal with the human misery that comes through the door of our offices as a result of what he is doing. That is the reason we are speaking about this and proposing that he abandon this Bill and actually listen to what others are saying. The Government has had its chance and has failed on housing. Maybe it might consider looking at some of the alternative proposals being put forward from this side.
Sentiment score: -0.02
Most of the points have been made about these amendments. I want the Minister to try to explain at what point he seriously believes the supply he is talking about is going to lead to a reduction in rents. Will he give us some indication? I think it is total fantasy. In the explanatory memorandum to the Bill and in his speech introducing the Bill, the Minister said that rents for long-standing tenancies should not fall behind the market. That is what the investors want. They are saying that if they have to deal with rents that are lower than the market, they are not going to build because the Government's rent controls are too restrictive as far as they are concerned and limit their ability to charge €2,500 or €3,000 per month. Therefore, they want the Government to get rid of them in order to incentivise them to come in and build. Is the Minister honestly saying to me that he thinks that if he does this, rents will fall at some point? I am interested to hear when he thinks that point is going to arrive because it has never happened before except during the crash and even then it did not happen for very long. Rents went down after the crash but only briefly. Can he tell me when he thinks rents are going to come down? Probably if he even thinks about that question, the likelihood that rents are ever going to come down is a total mirage and fantasy. Does he honestly believe that an average rent of, say, €30,000 per year or €2,500 per month, which is about €30,000 of after-tax income, is a reasonable level of rent to have in the capital city? How does he think people are supposed to pay that? I know very few people who think that is a sustainable rent. We have had a long debate on this amendment, so the last point I will make concerns why the Government keeps recycling the mythology that there has been a big exodus of landlords. There has not been a big exodus of landlords. There has been an increase in landlords. In 2023, there were 101,000 landlords in the country. I am sorry, that is not right. I do not have the right figures in front of me. In any event, the number of landlords has increased since 2023 and the number of tenancies has increased, so the private rental sector has increased and the number of landlords has increased over the past two years. If the Minister's argument is that unless we do tis, there will be a continued exodus, I suggest that there is a problem with his logic. Some might be leaving but there is a net increase in the number of people. The reason for this is because huge profits are being made by people who are landlords. How could huge profits not be made when they are charging the sort of extortionate rents that currently exist out in the market?
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Roughly.
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It is worthwhile at times, when we are discussing these things, which can seem quite dry and technical, to just remind ourselves of the human reality. Literally every week, I have somebody coming in to me who is facing a date for eviction. This week, given the particular week that is in it, I had a lovely young couple come in to me. Both of them have been working. They are probably about their mid-20s. They are a lovely couple. Throughout the whole engagement with this couple, they had with them their young son, who has special needs. He is about two or three - a lovely little fellow. He has the same name as my son, coincidentally. He was sitting there smiling at me the whole time during the meeting. His mother was just bawling crying the whole time. Her partner had to keep reaching over to hold her because, as much as she was trying to keep it together to explain the situation they were in, she just kept getting overwhelmed with fear because their date for eviction is this week. They have done absolutely nothing wrong, nothing at all. They are terrified about the prospect of what is going to happen to them and their child with special needs. Both of them told me that they themselves, later in life, have been diagnosed with special needs and are on the spectrum. They are finding it really difficult to cope with all the forms they have to fill out, and trying to understand HAP, homeless HAP and the thresholds. If they get the working family payment, what might that mean? Would it drive them over the social housing income threshold and make their situation even worse? They asked if there was anything I could do, and so on. When you look at their position on the list, you would think not, unless these people get prioritised, and to get prioritised is extremely difficult. The bar is getting higher and higher to get medical priority because a feature of these things is people who often are not doctors second-guessing people who are writing letters on behalf of people, where doctors say this person should be prioritised, that this kid should not go into homelessness because it would be really bad for them, or that this person because of their disability should not be in a hostel. The council, because it has nowhere to put them anyway, says it cannot prioritise them because it is not a severe enough disability. My question to the Minister is whether anything can justify this. Can anything justify the tears of that mother? Can anything justify that little child who is about two or three with special needs being driven into a hostel in town? They are absolutely terrified. I do not think they will go to a hostel in town, to tell the truth. I would say they would probably do almost anything bar go there. It is a long way out from any sort of family support networks they have in Dún Laoghaire, but that is what people get offered most of the time in Dún Laoghaire because we do not even have enough emergency accommodation there. People get sent into town to a hostel. They might be in there, and then after a year or two they might get into emergency accommodation in Dún Laoghaire. Then they do not know how long they might be there. They could be just languishing there for God knows how long. Can anything justify that being done to those people, in the Minister of State's mind? Can anything justify them being evicted in that circumstance to satisfy the investors, to incentivise? What we are being told is that has to be done, to incentivise the investors. It is a small landlord, by the way, doing that. They were not saying awful things about the small landlord. It is you guys who manage the sector. It is you guys who create and sustain a sector that allows that to happen. To my mind, if the consequence of the sort of rental sector we set up is that this happens to this family and this child, there is something wrong. There is something wrong with that. It is just not right for that to happen to that child or that mother. It is just not right; I do not care what justification the Minister of State wants to try to put on it. We know, as a Deputy said earlier, that it is people with spreadsheets in Antwerp and New York looking at Dublin and saying they cannot put the rent up to €2,500 in certain circumstances so they might not build there, because it is not profitable enough. The human consequence is that lovely couple, the tears and the child going in. To my mind that is State neglect. We passed that referendum on children and passed the Children First guidelines, which say the State is culpable of an abuse if a child is neglected. To my mind, the State is guilty of an abuse of that child and of the wilful neglect of the well-being of that child if the child is allowed to go into homelessness. I hear the Government say it is working on prevention of people going into homelessness. No, it is not. It is allowing that to happen. It thinks that in order to incentivise investors, this is legitimate. It is not legitimate. It is illegitimate. It is absolutely outrageous that it can be allowed to happen. Can the Minister of State honestly stand over that situation? That is just this week's example for me in my office. I am sure others can talk about their experiences in the last week or two of the same desperate situations. It really struck me just how confused and desperate and helpless people were, pleading for help, and I am just thinking there is nothing I can do because that is allowed. It is allowed that they can be thrown out and allowed that they have nowhere to be sent but a hostel. Very often in my area people say they would rather sleep in their car or pitch a tent somewhere than go into town into those hostels. That is the human reality of it all. The Government has a choice not to do that and say it is not acceptable. It is done in other countries. The Government says it is not evicting people into homelessness, that that is not going to happen because it is wrong, and it can do something else to make sure that does not happen. It can provide secure, affordable housing for people like that couple and their child.
Sentiment score: -0.04
It was interesting to hear what the Minister of State said in response to the instance that I set out of the couple and their child. I was just looking through the details of the case. They brought their youngest child with them. As I was reading over the details of the case, I realised that they have a daughter as well. Their son is two-years-old with special needs and autism. He was just diagnosed. They also have a nine-year-old daughter who has complex special needs. I was looking at the email they sent me describing their extreme anxiety and concern about what homelessness would mean and all of that for them in terms of the services that they are trying to access. They are waiting for those services as well to get an occupational therapist for their kid and what they will do if they have to move to another area even if they tried to move to another area. It is interesting that the homeless HAP limit that they were given to allow them to look for somewhere is high as €2,525. They are looking all the time and cannot find anywhere. The Minister wants those rents to go even higher. They will in my area. They will go up to €3,000 and €3,500. In the hopeless situation that they are in, all the Minister of State said is that they should engage with the local authority about emergency accommodation. I said to him that they are being told, and families like them are being told week in and week out, is to go to a hostel in Dublin city centre with their kids. They would be absolutely terrified to do. That is why the mother of these children kept bursting into tears. I could see it. She was envisaging in her head the prospect of bringing her kids into a hostel. She immediately burst into tears. Her partner was desperately trying to comfort her. Has the Minister of State got any other advice? We are asking for the prevention of evictions of vulnerable children like these and of two lovely parents in their 20s, who are both working hard to try to make their way in life and contribute to society. If the Minister will not do what is asked for in these amendments, which is to prevent people like them from being evicted into homelessness, can he offer anything more than saying, when I have explained the reality of the situation, that they should engage with the local authority regarding emergency accommodation? Given where they are on the list, they will be languishing in emergency housing for years. Let us be under absolutely no illusion that already vulnerable children with special needs will be damaged by that experience, possibly forever. There is not a shadow of a doubt about it. The best we can offer them and the many people like them is to say they should engage with the local authority. This point is relevant to the provisions in the Bill. In the case of the parents I mentioned, because their daughter will soon turn ten, their need is for a three-bedroom home. When there are children of opposite sexes, they are not supposed to share a room after one of them reaches ten years of age. The parents now must look for three-bedroom accommodation, which is completely impossible to find. People can forget about getting such a property from the council. We are talking about being on the list for a decade. In their desperation, the parents asked whether there was any chance they could look for a two-bedroom property. It would still be very difficult to find one under HAP but there might be some chance of it. However, that is not allowed because it would mean they were moving into overcrowding. This is the dilemma. We go to the council and suggest that people in this desperate situation, to avoid homelessness, be allowed to move into an overcrowded place. Of course, if these parents are made homeless in the next week, which is the deadline by which they must leave, they will definitely be overcrowded if they have to go into a hostel in the city. Indeed, it will be worse overcrowding because they will probably all be in one room together, as are many of the homeless families with whom I deal. We can put such families into one bedroom in emergency accommodation but the councils cannot give them a two-bedroom home because that is deemed to be overcrowding and not to meet their housing need. There is a dilemma here for local authorities and it will be even more so the case if this Bill is enacted, because one of the grounds on which evictions are still allowed is that landlords, big and small, can evict if their property is not suitable to a family's needs, which includes where there is overcrowding. That is a justification for evicting families. We really are on the horns of a dilemma in that families might have a chance of getting a property that is very far from perfect and in which they will be overcrowded but if they do so, they are then vulnerable to eviction by a landlord. The latter might say the property is not suitable to their needs if at any point that landlord decides he or she could get more rent by getting in people for whom the property is deemed appropriate to their needs. That is the mess we are in. or more to the point, that is the mess in which families in this situation find themselves. They are absolutely terrified for the well-being of their children and for themselves. The Minister could stop this, even on a temporary basis. He said we should thank God we are not in a pandemic. The dictionary definition of "pandemic" does not just refer to a global epidemic but is also applicable to something affecting a whole country. There is, in fact, a pandemic in Ireland. There is a pandemic of homelessness and a pandemic of housing crisis. If ever a housing and homelessness crisis could be described as a pandemic, it is the one we are living through. It is a pandemic in the literal meaning of the word and it justifies taking emergency measures to prevent damage being done to the children who will be homeless if we do not come up with a better answer than sending their parents to engage with the local authority about emergency accommodation in Dublin city centre.
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We are looking for answers.
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The Minister and I disagree. He is absolutely right that no one has a monopoly on compassion, but I honestly believe the Government has an obligation, as do I as a representative, to say something to the family I am talking about. The Minister has a responsibility for all the families who come into him. It is just not good enough to tell people to engage with their local authorities about emergency accommodation. Does the Minister think it is? I certainly do not. I have described the situation of the couple and I could describe an endless number of other cases that are on my books at the moment and people who are coming in week in, week out. They are absolutely terrified in their situations for their children. Would the Minister allow his children to be put in a situation that would damage them? I think the Minister would do anything – in fact I do not want to personalise this, because that is wrong too. However, any parent would do absolutely anything to prevent their child being put in that sort of situation. We should not be in a situation where we have to turn around and tell people that there is nothing we can do, and that their daughter and son with special needs who are vulnerable will just have to suck it up, as they will, and will have to go into that hostel even though it will be very bad for them. I seriously worry about the mental health of the mother in particular, after the engagement I had with her, about how she will be able to cope so it is just not good enough to say that. I hear from the Minister, as I have heard from successive Ministers, that the Government is developing policies to prevent people going into homelessness. If the Minister will not do what is in this amendment, will he please tell me what he is doing to prevent this and other families going into homelessness? Tell me. Is there another answer I am missing? Is there something I have not heard? Is there some policy the Minister is developing that will prevent this situation where the family has to end up in emergency accommodation next week? If the Minister cannot give that alternative suggestion, the best one going is the one being proposed in these amendments, which is, even on an emergency basis, to say “sorry, you will not be allowed to evict these people into homelessness". We need to freeze that possibility until we sort out this mess, which is certainly not the fault of this family or these kids. Whatever differences we have on policy and all the rest, we should say we will not put them into a worse position, an unacceptable position, until we have managed to sort out the bigger problem. That is what we are asking. Can the Minister tell me he has a better answer for them or is he just saying that he, I and Deputies Ó Broin, Sheehan and Hearne have to tell our constituents that there is nothing we can do and that at some point it might improve - we cannot say when exactly - when the investors in New York decide to reduce rents?
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No answer.
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