Ivana Bacik (Dublin Bay South, Labour) | Oireachtas source

On behalf of the Labour Party, I express our strong support for this Bill and commend Deputy Ó Broin and his colleagues on bringing it forward. It is just the most recent of many attempts by Opposition parties and individuals at a sensible and compassionate approach to the growing housing crisis. It is an attempt by us, across the Opposition benches, to offer Government a constructive way of addressing the impending cliff edge which so many families and renters face, starting from this Saturday, 1 April. Once again, I am disappointed to see the Government's amendment. I have read it carefully. It is essentially an expanded version of the amendment it put forward to the motion debated in the House last week. It is expanded and somewhat longer in content but, unfortunately, there is very little to add with regard to practical measures to offer to those facing the coming into effect of the notice to quit.

I am looking at the sorts of measures that are set out in the Government's countermotion. Many of them are very welcome but the key is in the future tense used. We hear the "Government will continue to support opportunities for the acquisition of properties to prevent homelessness". We hear the "cost rental tenant in situ backstop will be applied on an administrative basis from April 1st" and that the Government "will extend the Rent a Room scheme disregard for social welfare recipients". We hear the Department is "currently working with local authorities to bring on stream an additional 2,000 beds" and that the Government is "setting up a "Acquisition Delivery Team"". We hear the Government "will support local authorities to acquire at least 1,500 social homes" and "is developing proposals for a bespoke cost rental model". Those are welcome measures but they are measures in the future tense. They were not adopted or developed by Government during the past five or six months while the current eviction ban was in place.

The Government acknowledges - I think buried on page 5 of the countermotion - that "the eviction moratorium slowed down the numbers entering homelessness". There has been something of a counternarrative coming from some of the Senators and Ministers of State who have been out defending Government on the airwaves in recent days. The reality is the Minister concedes the moratorium slowed down the numbers entering homelessness. It had that very important impact on those individuals who would otherwise be out of their homes. The no-fault eviction ban had a vital purpose. That makes the unexpected decision to lift the ban from 1 April even more indefensible, because this was a deliberate and conscious decision, the impact of which will be to see more families at risk of or entering homelessness from next Saturday.

While much in the amendment is clearly admirable, it again gives little comfort to the families who are facing this cliff edge from Saturday. It reads as if it is again an attempt to give cover to those Deputies on the Government benches, but also Independent Deputies, who backed the Government last week and are feeling the pressure for doing so in their constituencies, because they are now understood to have supported an indefensible decision to lift the eviction ban without seeing the necessary and sensible contingencies put in place. To borrow a phrase from the late, great Labour Party Deputy from Limerick, Jim Kemmy, whose memory we honoured at the weekend at our party conference, all this amendment does is allow certain Deputies to play Mighty Mouse down in the constituency and Mickey Mouse up in Dublin, here in Leinster House, in voting with the Government.

That is something we need to recognise, because nobody who voted for an Independent Deputy in 2020 voted to put people into homelessness or voted for evictions, and yet we need to be mindful that will be the impact of the decision the Government has taken. The discomfort of Deputies in voting with the Government, despite facing this backlash, will be nothing compared with the utter distress and devastation caused to those families who have been served a notice to quit and have nowhere to go. I urge Government and the Minister to recognise the reasonable nature of this Bill and to support it, because it is not too late to extend the eviction ban. It is not too late to reverse the eviction ban and reverse the decision the Government has made. This is the time to do so.

All the allegations from Government of parliamentary theatrics, accusing us in Opposition of playing or posturing, show how out of touch it is with the real anxiety being felt by renters throughout the country. My motivation and that of my Labour Party colleagues in the measures we have put forward, especially in the tabling of the no-confidence motion, is to represent the people who are calling in to us and telling us their stories of hardship. Our motivation is to ensure we bring Ireland more into line with the norm in most European countries, where we see far greater protections for renters and sensible measures being adopted to address chronic housing shortages. However, most urgently, our motivation and that of everyone on this side of the House, is to keep people out of homelessness and prevent our homelessness services from collapsing, because we are all hearing from local authorities, housing charities and homelessness agencies of their utter, shall we say, failure to see how to cope with the numbers who will be coming forward to them.

Buried in the text of the Government's countermotion, there is an acknowledgement of this. According to the motion, Government "is aware of the challenges faced in sourcing emergency accommodation throughout the country and local authorities are working with the department to further increase capacity". Those are not words that will offer great comfort to families facing eviction from this Saturday, because that does not suggest measures have been put in place or, indeed, that local authorities have the capacity to deliver the necessary emergency housing they are all telling us they will need. They are all telling us they are already at capacity. We are hearing from homelessness support workers who are burnt out already in seeking to address existing need, and that is before we see the additional need coming on track.

It was only after the Minister had made the decision to lift the ban that we saw the figures from the Residential Tenancies Board, RTB, telling us that nearly 4,000 notices to quit were served in the third quarter of last year alone. We are all getting a sense of the number of people who are affected. All of us acknowledged, when the temporary no-fault ban was put in place, that there were two purposes it would serve. The first was to give breathing space to those renting, to keep them from entering homelessness or, in what I think were the words the Government used, slowing down the numbers entering homelessness. That is considerably important if you are one of the families whose homelessness has been slowed down. It is perhaps an unfortunate term to use. The second purpose, of course, was to give breathing space to Government to address the chronic shortage and ensure homes would be put in place for people who are facing eviction.

That is where there has been a real and serious failure by Government. What we are seeing now by those who are coming to us is an absence of anywhere to go for those who are being evicted. This has been recognised not just by those renting who are telling us of their distress and fear but also by landlords. In recent days, I have heard from several landlords pleading for an extension of the ban. They feel strongly about the Government's slowness in scaling up the tenant in situscheme in particular as well as the unexpected way the lifting of the ban was announced. It has caused them concern. They are concerned for people renting from them and from others they know.

We have been pressing the Minister on the tenant in situscheme since November. We put down a Labour Party motion on 9 February putting forward a series of emergency measures, including ramping up the tenant in situscheme, but what we are still seeing in the Government's countermotion is an acknowledgement it is still being worked on. It is a work in progress. It is not a work that has been completed. There was time. The Minister had time over the winter to put together a proper package of measures that could have been in place for those families facing this cliff edge from this Saturday, 1 April.

That was a cobbled-together series of motions put together at the last minute and not likely in any real sense to come into effect from Saturday. The Government's own Minister of State, Deputy Mary Butler, has criticised some aspects of those measures, which many of us understand are simply not practical to achieve in the short time available between now and Saturday.

Not only did we put down a motion on 9 February putting forward a series of emergency measures that we called on Government to adopt. We also put forward a further constructive proposal, which I sent to the Taoiseach on 16 March, and put to him several times in the Chamber. I still have not received a response. It was a draft Bill to provide for a facility to extend the eviction ban on an evidence base. We called for the ban to be extended, again on a temporary, no-fault basis, until we see a demonstrable drop in homelessness figures over four consecutive months. The Taoiseach carped about how we would measure it, and why it was four months rather than one or two. What we are saying is that we need an evidence base. We need to see something beyond this time basis and references to meteorological conditions. Sure, as the Minister said in a response to a parliamentary question of mine, the winter eviction ban was based on the winter ban in place in France. He has done no modelling on the impact of lifting the ban at this time. He has done no modelling on the impact on landlords or renters of doing so. He has given us no indication that he has any basis in evidence, any rational basis, for lifting it at this time. We have offered an alternative approach motivated by the homeless agencies, the Simon Communities and others which have called for an evidence base to be adopted instead by Government. The Minister's refusal to accept our reasonable proposals, or reasonable proposals from others in opposition, such as Sinn Féin's Bill tonight, that failure has driven us, as a last resort and as a measure we do not take lightly, to put forward the motion of no confidence in the Government tomorrow. We are calling on all Independents to support us in voting no confidence in a Government that has chronically failed to deliver on housing.

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