Residential Tenancies and Valuation Bill 2020: Committee and Remaining Stages Seanad Éireann — 2020-07-31 ============================================================ Alice-Mary Higgins (IND), National University of Ireland I support the amendment. We may not press all of these amendments to a vote but with the amendments being grouped in section 4 there will be just two opportunities to speak to the amendments in this section. I put it to the Minister of State that there are a lot of problems with section 4. If the Minister of State cannot accept our amendments, and if he recognises the merit in our arguments, I urge him to consider not commencing section 4. I will be very frank. I believe it opens up significant concerns and fears. I spoke on Second Stage about the fear people might have when they have to make a self declaration. I was concerned about whether people who are cocooning or people of different ages are covered. I went again to see who is covered and who is a relevant person. The Government is asking ordinary citizens across Ireland to make this declaration - and I will discuss the matter of an offence in the next section, which is its own problem - but we must consider the literacy issues as highlighted by Senator Keogan, and that more than half the population have digital literacy issues. How will such a person decide if he or she is a relevant person? I apologise to my colleagues and I will not give long speeches on other amendments, but this is important. As a legislator who has been legislating for years and is familiar with reading legislation, I was trying to determine who is a relevant person. The section raises the question of whether a relevant person is on temporary wage subsidy, a supplementary welfare allowance, or any other payment from public moneys for the purposes of alleviating financial hardship. Is this a jobseeker's payment or is it for alleviating financial hardship? Perhaps clarity is needed. Will the new jobseeker's payment, due to come into effect in the next few days, definitely be covered in this section? It is currently not named. Again, a Government amendment to this effect might have been useful if it was intended. Instead it says "any other payment". Is the working family payment covered here? If a person receives the working family payment is he or she a relevant person in this regard? Perhaps a family had been on very low wages but is now reliant on the working family payment. Is this enough to qualify a person as a relevant person for this legislation? Let us consider the other criteria a person might need to be a relevant person. Section 4 says the relevant person will be a person "to whom subsection (7) (inserted by section 5 of the Health (Preservation and Protection and other Emergency Measures in the Public Interest) Act 2020) of section 40 of the Act of 2005 applies". Let us check back into definitions and interpretation where many lines in six different Bills are mentioned, and we find that "the Act of 2005" means the Social Welfare Consolidation Act 2005. We then go to find subsection (7) of that Act. Subsection (7), as inserted by the new legislation relates to those in local authority housing, including Traveller accommodation. Great. Now we know that people who live in local authority housing might not be evicted under this proposed legislation. That was a little bit of work. Let us now look to see about the other category of relevant persons being "belonging to a category prescribed under subsection (8) of the said section 40". Let us roll back to see what section 40 is. That would be section 40 of "the Act of 2005", which is the Social Welfare Consolidation Act 2005. Now we must look for the Social Welfare Consolidation Act 2005, but it is not updated on the website. I had my assistant go to work on it but we could not find things in the paper. We contacted the Bills Office. We looked in the Irish Statute Book and eventually after 40 minute's work we discovered that the Social Welfare (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 2010, which is not mentioned anywhere in this legislation, actually had amended that section. We had been told there was no section 8 in the Social Welfare Consolidation Act 2005 as published. They inserted a new subsection (8) into section 6 of the 2010 Act and it states: "Without prejudice to subsection (7), the Minister might make regulations ... in relation to persons or classes of persons who may certify that an insured person ... [is] incapable of work." We have done all that work and we have got to a part at the end that tells us there may be some regulations the Minister has made in terms of who is qualified but that is subsection (8) as it was in the 2010 Act. The fact that a new section 7 was inserted in the emergency provisions legislation might mean that what was section 6(8) in the 2010 Act has now become subsection (8). Section 6(7) of the 2010 Act refers to a person who has a document from a registered medical practitioner categorising that he or she is incapable of work and which he or she has provided to an officer of the Minister. Is it what was previously subsection (7) of section 6 of the 2010 Act, which may, since the emergency legislation, have become subsection (8) of section 40 of the Social Welfare Consolidation Act 2005, which states that the person has to have a certificate from a medical practitioner or is it the new section 8 as inserted in the 2010 Act, which is now a subsection of section 40 of the Social Welfare Consolidation Act 2005, which states that it is a person who the person has made regulations to say that they are incapable of work? I am a little unclear about that, and I am a legislator who has been working in the area of legislation for years. I do not know if the Minister of State can categorically tell me which of those it is. --- 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