“Brutal emergency situation” in housing say Louth TD

Out of control rents and the pressure on local authority resources as they struggle to meet demand has lead to a “brutal emergency situation” in housing, Dundalk TD Ruairí Ó Murchú has said.

The Sinn Féin TD contributed to the People Before Profit motion in Leinster House last week on their proposed Rent Reduction Bill.

Deputy Ó Murchú said he had seen availability of houses on the property website, daft.ie, go from 15 to eight. He said there was a house with ‘a considerable number of bedrooms’ for rent at €3,000 a month.

He said:

“I do not know I could have told somebody a number of years ago that one could be paying that sort of money to rent a house in the Dundalk area. I am sure I could have told people that, but they would have laughed at me. Unfortunately, that is not the case.

“This is an absolute brutal emergency situation and asked when will we deal with it like it is. What we are getting is bit operations, piecemeal actions. We are more inclined to put money into the pockets of developers than get down to building.

“Everyone will be aware of the Sinn Féin proposals in relation to the building of 20,000 public houses. We are talking about cost-rental, council and affordable houses. When we are talking about affordable, we are talking about what really is affordable.

“We know that we are in an even tighter circumstance, that people are even in a worse situation because of the eviction ban being pulled’.

He highlighted the issue of the pressure on councils, particularly given the ‘cobbling together’ of the tenant in situ scheme by the government.

He said: “The bit I could never understand is that the Minister (for Housing) did not even have his ducks in a row.

And Deputy Ó Murchú said Louth County Council has paused the acceptance of applications for various disabled persons’ grant schemes ‘due to the vast over subscription which exceeds both budgets and capacity to manage and process applications’.

He said: “I know of circumstances where people have been able to qualify for grants and the grants have not covered the necessary works to be done. We are talking about elderly people and telling them to come back, apply next year and maybe they will get it two years after that. We do not know what heartache we will put people and families through.

"Unfortunately, we do not have a Government that is able to offer the necessary solutions, whether we are talking about rents or about housing in general.

“We are talking about absolute rental chaos and calamity. Could we not just say we need, at the very least, to completely stall any increases? We are dealing with a brutal set of emergency circumstances.

“Could we not look at putting a month's rent per year back into renters' pockets? I really cannot fathom how people are able to get the money on a day-to-day basis to keep roofs over their heads. The reality is that in some cases they cannot do so.

“These circumstances have been made a million times worse by the eviction ban being lifted without the necessary supports being put in place.”