I thank the Minister for coming to the House to propose the legislation. Before addressing the Bill, I welcome the decision he made this week on co-living. The decision should have been made sooner but when I read the report I realised the Minister had not taken on officials' advice to tinker but rather made a clear decision on banning co-living. I would have liked for this to apply retrospectively and particularly to current proposals going through the planning system. I hope An Bord Pleanála takes on board the Mi…

I apologise for not being in the Chamber but I was in a committee and I have to go to a committee afterwards. I request a debate on an issue I wish to bring to the attention of the House, that is, the very welcome decision yesterday by the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, to ban co-living developments. That is really welcome. The report says that applications that have been made for co-living developments are undermining the concept because they are not within the high de…

I thank Senator Flynn for raising this issue on the Order of Business and putting on it on the agenda of the House today. There is rightfully a lot of talk about the housing crisis but little attention is given to the long-term lack of supply of Traveller accommodation. Each local authority is required to have a Traveller accommodation action plan. The new plans came in two years ago but by the end of October 2019, less than one third of the funds allocated for Traveller accommodation last year has been spent with …

I submitted this matter for debate because the week before last five homeless people died. We already had a spike in the number of homeless people during the summer. That could have been due to Covid-19, or people may not have been comfortable within homeless services because of a lack of social distancing and therefore opted to live in tents. There was a tragic death in my area of a homeless man who was attacked for his mobile phone. He was living in a tent down a lane in a residential area. As we head into the wi…

I thank the Minister of State. It is good to hear that he intends to establish a task force and that additional resources will go into homeless services. Like the Minister of State, I want to express my gratitude to all of the people who have worked in homeless services from March onwards. It was quite a remarkable feat in terms of the outbreak within homeless services. Everybody pulled together. It is important we ensure that no more homeless families enter homelessness. While it is good to see the figure stabilis…

I want to raise the issue of purpose-built student accommodation being granted planning permission for short-term use as tourist or visitor accommodation. There are guidelines for purpose-built student accommodation. I do not think anyone could argue that we do not need some purpose-built student accommodation but what we have seen since the guidelines were introduced is luxury accommodation being built in the wrong places, specifically in the inner city. In my own area, we have just under 4,000 units of purpose-bu…

I am sharing my time with Senator Sherlock. I am somewhat dismayed to be here listening to what seems to be the defining political narrative of this Oireachtas, which involves Sinn Féin taking a populist pop at Fine Gael over elitism and Fine Gael bouncing back with a swipe at Sinn Féin over underhand tactics. The rest of us are caught in this arrangement that is mutually beneficial to both parties. A confidence motion in an individual took up Dáil time yesterday and now we have this issue, which involves one party…

I thank the Green Party Senators for drafting this very comprehensive motion. I listened to the informative and entertaining speech from Senator Garvey on the issue. As a pure inner-city woman who grew up in a concrete jungle, I always find it useful to listen to contributors with a knowledge of peat, soil and hedgerows. It is generally accepted that we are in the middle of a climate and biodiversity crisis with dramatic knock-on effects. As the motion notes, around 1 million animal species are threatened with exti…

My party supports this Bill but we will not be speaking on it.

I thank the Minister for coming to the House. The Labour Party will vote in favour of the Bill because we believe the eviction ban should be extended but we do not believe the Bill has gone far enough. I have tabled an amendment extending the eviction ban to at least March, allowing the ban to be enforced when any limit is put on movement and allowing the ban when people are allowed only to travel within their county. The Minister served the constituency, but some would say county, of Fingal. If people in Fingal we…

I move amendment No. 2: In page 4, between lines 4 and 5, to insert the following: “Emergency period 2. (1) Subject to subsection (2), an emergency period, in relation to the tenancy of a dwelling, shall be a period in respect of which relevant regulations made by the Minister for Health restrict travel to, from or within the area or region within which the dwelling concerned is situated. (2) Where the period referred to in subsection (1) is specified in relevant regulations as ending on a date before 31 March 2021…

I will speak briefly because I referred to the amendment in my speech. This amendment seeks to extend the eviction ban until, at the very least, March 2021. It also allows the Minister, where there are any restrictions on movement, to impose an eviction ban. That is a particular issue. The 5 km limit is very restrictive, particularly when one is talking about within a county. I gave the example of Fingal. In the briefing the other day with the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage, there was the pres…

Yes.

I thank the Minister for coming to the House. I will address some of the issues around the much lauded largest ever investment in housing. The pandemic has exposed the cost of our broken housing system. We see people in low-paid jobs not just sharing rooms but hot bedding, renters being evicted and the crisis in social housing and homelessness continuing. The spin is that this is the largest investment ever in housing but when one drills down into it, the detail shows little progress. Anybody at the coalface of the…

I thank Senator Gavan and the Sinn Féin group for bringing forward this motion. I also thank the Ministers of State, Deputies Feighan and Hildegarde Naughton, for coming into the House to discuss it. Coming from Dublin, I am struck by the great degree of openness and collaboration among people from the mid-west region regarding Shannon Airport. All of us come to this discussion with the best of intentions to try to find a solution. During the discussion we had on the wider aviation sector some weeks ago, I said tha…

I will be sharing my time with Senator Hoey, and for clarification, Senator Sherlock will wrap up the debate on behalf of the Labour Party. I thank my colleague, Senator Sherlock, for all the work she has put into this, in particular on leading the agenda on sick pay. Senator Sherlock has been a leading trade unionist in this country, and neither she nor the Labour Party has come late to the issue of workers' rights. I note, with some irony, a Fine Gael representative referring back to our manifesto on the issue, a…

I thank the Minister of State for coming in to address us today. It is not an overstatement to say the growth of the airline and aviation industry in Ireland transformed our fortunes in the 1990s, particularly in regional settings. We are a small island reliant on access to the outside world for our economic well-being and global and social connections. Covid-19 has put the aviation industry under major pressure. It has surpassed the effect of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, when we thought passenger n…

We need both the State and stakeholders to work together to ensure airlines support these industries. I am surprised that in the comprehensive address made by the Minister of State, she did not mention the potential kite flying by Aer Lingus of building some of its operations in the UK and bypassing Shannon in the process. It looks like under the cover of Covid-19, Aer Lingus is moving to cost-cutting or savings measures by going to the UK. I thought the Minister of State would have addressed the subject. I echo th…

I call on the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage to come to the House to have a wider debate around the issue of protecting our built heritage. Yesterday a developer pulled down The O'Rahilly House in Ballsbridge, despite the city council voting to give it protection by listing it on the record of protected structures. From my understanding, once a local authority moves to put something on the record of protected structures it enjoys the protection of that act until an assessment is made. I want to…

I wish to raise an issue that affects thousands of people, namely, those who live in defective Celtic tiger-era apartments. The programme for Government contains a commitment for the examination of defective homes following recommendations made in a 2018 report by the Oireachtas housing committee. The programme sets out that the examination should take place within the first 12 months of the life of the Government. The Minister has met relevant parties but I ask him to come in here and update Members on the review …