A person who has previously engaged with homeless services, and who has moved on to a stable tenancy, and, for example, as in a number of cases that have been quoted by the DRHE have died from other tragic causes need to be treated as a separate category because their vulnerability is very different. The Minister probably agrees with that point and I look forward to the report and to his engagement with the committee but we also need to see what additional interventions will be put in place so that we have a reduct…

St. Cuthbert's Park is a medium-sized park in south-west Clondalkin, in my constituency, which is surrounded by some 2,000 houses, comprising both council housing and private homes. The people living in Bawnogue work very hard and pay their rent or mortgage and their taxes, including the property tax. They contribute enormously to the very vibrant local community. For example, the Friends of St. Cuthbert's Park group organises family days and cinema evenings. Local men and women put an enormous amount of time volun…

I thank the Minister of State, Deputy Malcolm Noonan, for his attendance. As he knows, the funding mechanism for this project is something called the housing land initiative, which predates the formation of this Government. It is wholly inappropriate for delivering good quality public housing on public land. There is an alternative, which the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, can put on the table straight away. He can meet Dublin City Council management and offer the counc…

The land initiative was only ever used as a financing mechanism because central government would not give local authorities the funds required to develop sites themselves. It was partly because funding was slashed after the recession of 2008 and then after the recovery because Fine Gael did not want to invest. It makes no sense to allow 50% of the homes on public lands to be sold at unaffordable open-market prices and then allow a developer to extract the full market land value from the affordable homes so that the…

Today's debate is about low standards, credibility and trust but, most of all, it is about how Government business is done by Fine Gael. Last week, Leo Varadkar admitted to leaking a highly confidential document. When his colleague, the then Minister for Health, was asked to leak the same document, he refused, yet the leader of Fine Gael passed the document, marked "Confidential" and "not for circulation", to a personal friend and political supporter. He gave it to an individual and organisation that stood to gain,…

I move: That leave be granted to introduce a Bill entitled an Act to amend the Housing Act 1988 to provide a legal definition of persons at risk of homelessness and to give the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage and local authorities the power to provide such persons with supports to prevent them from becoming homeless. As Deputies know, the number of adults and children in emergency accommodation and homelessness remains unacceptably high. The two bans on evictions arising out of the Covid-19 cris…

I move: "That the Bill be taken in Private Members' time."

I look forward to the Minister being as positive in response to my query as she was to the previous one. I thank her for taking time out of a long and busy day to be here so late to deal with this issue. I will start by introducing her to a woman I know. Her name is Kirsty. She has been a foster parent for more than 13 years. She, and her then partner, started fostering, and they were a regular family, with employment and a home. As with many people, however, life intervened and Kirsty is now a single parent. In th…

This is an issue where, with a bit of common sense and goodwill, we can make a difference to people's lives. Someone like Kirsty today can legitimately claim jobseeker's allowance because she has no full-time employment. She is in receipt of jobseeker's allowance and the State pays that in recognition of the fact that she has no means. The foster care allowance is not a payment to provide an income support to the parent; it is to provide for the costs of fostering the child in recognition of the work that has to be…

I move: That leave be granted to introduce a Bill entitled an Act to establish a Latent Defects Redress Board, the functions of which shall be, inter alia, to provide resolution to ordinary owners who purchased homes in good faith, in order that such owners have an opportunity to seek mediation or adjudication in relation to non-compliance with building regulations. As Deputies are aware, thousands of homeowners and hundreds of social housing tenants across the State live in properties with Celtic tiger-era latent …

I move: "That the Bill be taken in Private Members' time."

For several years, many Deputies have been calling for a legislative ban on evictions in order to prevent homelessness. The Focus Ireland amendment, legislation very carefully crafted by one of the country's leading homeless charities, was tabled on up to five separate occasions during the previous Dáil but, each time, it was voted down by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. For several years, and particularly since prices in the rental sector reached historic highs, many Deputies have been calling for a ban on rent increas…

I move amendment No. 1: In page 4, between lines 3 and 4, to insert the following: “(4) Notwithstanding the interpretation contained in section 1(2) , sections 2 , 3 and 4 shall also apply to such persons living in dwellings with written license agreements, verbal license agreements and informal rent-a-room arrangements.”. This is a straightforward amendment. One of the most vulnerable sections of the community who live in the private rental sector are people who do not have tenancies. They often have licences, inf…

I move amendment No. 2: In page 4, between lines 4 and 5, to insert the following: “2. (1) An emergency period in relation to the tenancy of a dwelling shall be a period of at least six months from the enactment of this Act.”. Again, this amendment is self-explanatory.

It seeks to do what the eminent and-----

No, we can wait. That is okay.

The amendment seeks to do what the very eminent Deputy O'Dowd proposed, and what Deputy Cian O'Callaghan and I are seeking to do, which is to introduce a six-month ban on evictions. I want to briefly address the issue of the Constitution and the advice of the Attorney General. As you will know as a legal professional, a Leas-Cheann Comhairle, there is not a unified school of thought on the interpretation and the use of the Constitution. There is one eminent school of thought, and the current and previous Attorneys …

I will be pressing the amendment.

I move amendment No. 4: In page 4, line 6, after "regulations" to insert the following: ", including restrictions on the number or type of persons who can enter a dwelling, in order to limit the spread of Covid-19 or". As I said at the outset, one of the weaknesses of the Bill is that the eviction ban is limited in its applicability to the triggering of the 5 km travel restriction by the Minister for Health. This means we could have a situation where we are in a level 4 plus lockdown and there could, for public hea…

I move: "That the Bill be now read a Second Time." This morning we read in the newspapers of yet another co-living application. It is a proposed 14-storey development - twice the height cap in that part of the city - with 506 co-living beds in Dublin city centre. According to An Bord Pleanála and the Dublin local authorities, there have been more than 36 co-living planning applications in recent times, totalling more than 5,055 co-living bedrooms in the capital. Comparing that to the paltry number of live planning …