Residential Tenancies and Valuation Bill 2020: Second Stage Seanad Éireann — 2020-07-31 ============================================================ Mark Wall (LAB), Industrial and Commercial Panel I welcome the Minister of State and wish him well in his role. I look forward to working with him. My party's spokesperson on housing, Senator Moynihan, outlined our concerns regarding what is a very flawed Bill. Senator Boyhan noted that there are 40 amendments tabled for debate on Committee Stage. Senator Moynihan and other colleagues will talk us through those amendments in due course, which seek to address the flaws in the Bill. I have several points to make that are relevant to the debate. The first is to address what Senator Davitt said about the wall of money made available to county councils. I can only say that this Wall has not seen the wall of money to which he referred. Both Senators Fitzpatrick and Higgins noted that local authorities have an opportunity to purchase one-off houses. I draw the Minister of State's attention to a case in County Kildare - one of several such cases - where contracts were signed with the homeowner in November last year for the sale of the property to Kildare County Council. That person has now been told that the council, on the instructions of Government, can no longer go through with the purchase. This is directly in opposition to what is happening in Dublin City Council and other local authorities. Clearly, Kildare County Council is not part of this particular purchasing policy. As I said, I am aware of a number of such cases. Senator Fitzpatrick correctly noted that some landlords will sell their houses to maintain a tenant in the property, but Kildare County Council is being told this is not an option. Will the Minister of State confirm whether that is the case? It is what I have been told. I want to place on record my thanks to the public servants who deal on a daily basis with housing queries. I am sure we will all join in thanking them for their work. There has been a lot of talk in the past week about what public servants do or do not do. I totally abhor what has been said in some quarters. Day in and day out, public servants go about their work. In particular, the staff at housing counters throughout the country deal with people who are at the limit of what they can endure. Their quality of life when they come in to engage with our public servants is at an all-time low. It is important that I take this opportunity to record my thanks to those public servants who deal with people who are going through the trauma of not having a home. The HAP scheme was mentioned by a number of speakers. There is a serious problem in County Kildare in regard to what I refer to as inter-county HAP arrangements. To give an example, in my town of Athy, a house recently became available 1 mile from the town boundary but over the county boundary in County Laois. A person who was in a homeless situation was not able to take that property under the HAP scheme, even though it would have resolved her situation. My colleagues in the Dáil have put in a number of parliamentary questions on this issue and the response from the Department is that such decisions are a matter for the local authority. However, Kildare County Council is saying that its direction from the Department is otherwise. Can the Minister of State tell us whether something will be done once and for all about inter-county HAP arrangements? I am sure other Members have encountered the same issue in their areas. It would help to solve the housing crisis if local authorities could override county boundaries and offer HAP properties that are located only 1 mile or 2 miles from a particular town or village. I heard this morning on my local radio station, Kfm, that 167 people were in homeless accommodation in County Kildare in May. When we take into account the corresponding numbers of 124 for County Meath and 27 for County Wicklow - all three counties being part of the mid-east region - it paints a very bleak picture. I received up to ten phone calls relating to housing before I came to the Chamber today. Senator O'Loughlin referred to our reliance on voluntary housing. We have to get away from this. We must get rid of the hubs that have been created. Once and for all, we have to build council houses. They were good enough for generations of people. Let us go back to building council houses. Our reliance on voluntary houses has to stop. Less than two hours ago in a WhatsApp message, a person asked me to "Get me out of here". This legislation will do nothing to help that person. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2020-07-31/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:48:31+00:00 Sitting date: 2020-07-31