Richard Boyd Barrett urges eviction ban extension and mass retrofits

Minister, while this is primarily going to be about the climate transition we need to make, I do just, given that you're here, want to raise one urgent issue, I think, and it would be good to get your response, threshold of the latest group today to appeal to the government to extend the eviction ban for a number of months, for the foreseeable future, I would argue, some of us have been saying that eviction ban should be in until we address the housing emergency, but can you say anything about certainly not allowing that eviction ban to expire at the end of this month, because as Threshold point out, and many of us have made this point over the last number of weeks, people on reduced incomes, or have lost their jobs, have built up arrears, rent arrears, people on top up payments for haps that they wouldn't have been able to manage, and other people who are just being threatened by vulture funds with evictions for spurious reasons that you allow, because you fail to close down loopholes which allow them to do this, but for all of those reasons, after everything people have gone through, we do not need a slew of evictions coming down the track after the eviction ban is due to be lifted at the end of this month, so I think you should give that certainty to people, so that people don't stumble from one extremely difficult situation in terms of a public health emergency into another one of facing eviction. So I'd like to hear your response to that, excuse me, and to mention an example that I've cited here, you know, it's just indicative of how nothing really happens, I mean you were accusing other people of spin, I wasn't joking when I think the real title should be spin a gale, because I mean I've raised just one block of apartments in Dun Laoghaire for two and a half, three years, where there's been four successive attempts by vulture funds to evict people on spurious grounds, there's now half of that block is just sitting empty for two years, because the landlord sees it as more beneficial for their agenda to leave apartments sitting empty while people desperately need them, they're facing eviction, if you don't extend that no eviction clause immediately, there are cases in the PRTB, for no reason, for no, you know, no fault of their own, but there's many others like them, you should step in, stop those evictions, and in my mind you should take over that whole block using a compulsory purchase order, so they're safe, and the ten units that are sitting outrageously empty for two years could be used by people desperate on the housing list for housing, so I just throw that in, I would also say, as a by the way response to your comments on the government's sort of success, in terms of housing, the facts are pretty awful, Minister, the latest figures in rebuilding Ireland, in terms of local authority directly built housing, is you built less in 2019 than you did in 2018, less, it's not getting better, in terms of local authority housing output, it is getting worse, you built 12, 1,1238 in 2018, you only managed to build 1,088 in 2019, but in Dublin the situation is worse, for Dublin counties in 2018, you built 634 council houses, a pathetic number in and of itself, in 2019 that has gone down to 228, and in Dun Laoghaire, the figure has gone from 218, where we managed to build 120, against a housing list of 5,000, to 219, where we managed to build 17, 17, with a housing list of 5,000, and next year, I'll just tell you a little secret, Minister, there'll be less than 17 built, less, right, so it's getting worse, worse, not better, and you see, this is very, very relevant, to whether we can take seriously, government talk, about doing something about the climate emergency, and 7% emission targets, reductions, 7% a year, annual emission targets, because you do produce plans, there's a lot of promises, there's a lot of spin, but we don't see the delivery, as we see with local authority housing, I don't see how the Greens imagine, for one second, they are going to get 7% annual target emissions, with the approach you have, which is not serious, at every level, I won't list, you know, the fact you want to expand the herd, you want to continue with the LNG, and you can go through the list, you want to count out the fossil fuel industry, in terms of the fossil fuel ban, and so on, but, if in the specific area of housing, it is blatantly obvious, the market can't deliver, and if there's one thing you should have learned, from the pandemic, you were forced to learn this, is that when the state intervenes, when the market has to shut down, when the state intervenes, it can do so, right, it is capable of doing so, so the government doesn't pass off responsibility, but it does it itself, right, and that is what's needed, if we are going to retrofit the housing stock in this country, which has to be housed, the state has to do it, by establishing a state construction company, marshalling the resources, and having a planned approach, to at least 100,000 retrofits a year, which could, and indeed we've gone to the trouble of, in our manifesto, even though you say we're only the party of protest, actually, along with the government, in fairness, but ours is much more ambitious, we're the only people who have a costed retrofit program for the next 10 years, it is expensive, but it will save us massive fines, and it will save us massive emissions, and it will improve the quality of housing for hundreds and hundreds of thousands of our citizens, who are in chronic, in many cases, chronic, damp, poorly insulated homes, where their quality of life suffers as a result of it, I mean, it doesn't surprise me we have such high asthma rates in this country, when you consider that 86% of people live in houses that are C-rated on the bear ratings, or worse, and most of them much, much worse than that, and we are not even touching the problem, because we are essentially leaving it to the market, rather than the state doing it, and now is the time, Minister, to change approach, because we have, sadly, hundreds of thousands of young people now, without jobs, possibly for the foreseeable future, where whole sectors of our economy are not likely to recover in the foreseeable future, now, if we really went out to recruit apprentices, to recruit trades people, to a state construction company, where they were paid decently, and were guaranteed that they would have security of employment, you would actually get them into the construction sector, to retrofit the houses at the scale we need to do, but the state would have to give that certainty to people, why do you think half the people who were in construction 10 years ago left, because the boom slump caused by the private market dumped them on the scrap heap, and they said, I'm never going back to construction, because that's what happens in this industry, because of the way you ran it, but if we had a state company that did it, if we had a state, it is, if they had a state company doing it, giving guaranteed employment, quality employment, recruiting apprentices, and so on, we could do the scale of retrofit program that we need to do, and the other thing, just sorry, yeah, just the other thing, the pay as you save scheme, the government have been talking about for years, right, why the hell do we not have it, I just don't understand, give people 30 or 40,000 in grants, interest-free, but no cost in terms of extra payments, by just making them repay it back to the savings they get when their house is insulated. I'll try and answer all your questions as quickly as I possibly can, just on the last one, I totally agree with you with the scheme for a retrofit scheme, that pay as you save, that can be run by the state, some energy companies provide the offer the same thing as well, there is a retrofit target task force set up across all the different departments looking at how best we use the allocation of 3 billion over the next number of years to deal with this, and that hopefully they'll report quite soon, and the next government, wherever they are, can make decisions how best to do that as well. Your own about apprenticeships and changes there, thankfully we, a number of years ago, we made major changes around the whole apprenticeship model, and the whole offer of apprenticeships, and we've seen a massive uptake in apprenticeships across many different sectors, along with I think at this stage, nearly 40 new types of apprentices, so absolutely there's a major opportunity there to convert people over, upskill them, skills conversion and so on, to be able to tackle housing, retrofit and so on, regardless of whether estate or private can be done, absolutely total review to that as well, and you're, to be honest with you, we, I don't do spin here, because we can't, if I sit here, I have to speak on behalf of my department, and it's all officially in the Dáil record, so I don't do spin, and I keep, I don't like you constantly saying that, you'll keep doing it, I'll keep defending it, but factually, whether you like it or not, it's proven that there's over 10,000 new social houses in the system this year, you're obsessed with one form of delivery, one form of build, my obsession is getting people family homes, I'm not obsessed with who builds them, I'm obsessed with getting them, and since we started rebuilding Ireland, over 100,000 families are now in homes that they wouldn't be in if you were doing your schemes, because they wouldn't have built that many, you keep saying you don't want HAP, doing the private sector, yet you have not ever given me a solution, for the 40,000 plus families are in HAP houses today, where do they go tomorrow, under your scheme, if you don't use those private houses in the short term, while you build more houses, in relation to that, the one question you did ask, and we do agree with, was in relation to the extra protections that were given during the COVID, under the legislation, brought in here in March, that Minister Murphy prepared, brought through the houses here, in relation to evictions and rent increases and so on, that, that current thing can end in June, Minister Murphy will deal with this at Cabinet, either this week, or next week, under the legislation that was passed here in March, I think you would pose it by the way, those protections can be extended up until the end of November, in that window, so that decision can be made quite soon, and I think you're right, people want to hear what's happening, as well as dealing with the potential backlog of barriers, there is research done on that as well, and we'll react to that when we can as well.