The Government plans to lift the eviction ban in ten days. If it does this, where are the working families, single people and pensioners at risk of losing their homes meant to go? This question has been put to the Taoiseach repeatedly and those people still wait for an answer. Without putting any measures in place, the Government intends to remove this protection for renters during an unprecedented housing emergency. Homes to rent are at an all-time low, rents are at an all-time high, housing supply is too slow and housing prices are through the roof. We have record homelessness and emergency accommodation in many areas is full. Now, the Government's decision to lift the eviction ban throws renters to the wolves. We are talking about people who work hard, pay for everything and do all the right things to build a decent future. We are talking about tens of thousands of people trapped in the rental market who, in another generation, would have had the opportunity to buy a home of their own. This is a nightmare for renters who have been hit with an eviction notice. Thousands more are terrified of that call from their landlord with the news that they must leave their home. One family in Wicklow, including two children, have received an eviction notice. They have lived in their rented home for 11 years. They are now considering renting storage units and living out of a car.

By lifting the eviction ban, the Government makes the political choice to escalate a housing emergency that was already out of control, and it is working people who pay the price. To be clear, the eviction ban is not a permanent solution. What it does is buy time for the Government to deal with the underlying issues. The Taoiseach says he is worried about landlords exiting the market. Then give local authorities the clear instruction and financial firepower they need to buy those houses to keep tenants in their homes and expand the scheme to cover those not on the social housing list. Approved housing bodies are ready to act. We have thousands of vacant homes but the Government is too slow in bringing them back into use. We need pace. The Government must streamline the process and remove the stifling bureaucracy involved.

We know that new technologies present the way forward for housing construction. Where is the initiative from the Government to harness these technologies? Where is the ambition? Ultimately, we need the biggest housing programme in the history the State and the delivery of genuinely affordable homes to rent or buy. Ireland is a great country. Our people are up and at it and our economy is strong. There is scope within the public finances for a transformative housing plan. What we need is a Government with the ambition to get the job done.

Nuair a ardaíonn an Rialtas an cosc ar dhíshealbhú ar 1 Aibreán, cá bhfuil sé i gceist ag daoine dul? Caithfidh an Rialtas an cinneadh a chur ar ceal. Ní mór an cosc ar dhíshealbhú a shíneadh amach go dtí deireadh na bliana.

Sinn Féin’s motion tonight calls on the Government to reverse its decision and extend the eviction ban. I ask every Deputy to think very carefully about the renters in their constituency and protect them by voting in favour of this motion.

Should the Government proceed with this cruel decision, my question still stands: where are those people facing eviction from 1 April meant to go?

As was always the case, whether six months ago, before the moratorium was in place, a year ago, three years ago or five years ago, it depends on everyone's individual circumstances. It is not the case that every notice to quit turns into an eviction, and it is not the case that every eviction results in somebody living in emergency accommodation. Deputy McDonald conflates the three things, and it is not accurate to do so. Some people will find alternative accommodation, while others will need to rely on the State to help them find accommodation. That is the way it was six months ago, before this moratorium existed. It is the way it was three years ago. It is the way it would have been in February or March if Sinn Féin were to have its way and extend the eviction ban until then. This was a temporary measure. It was put in place only for the winter period and it will end on a phased basis from the end of March of this year.

Unfortunately, when the moratorium was in place, it did not reduce the number of homeless people in Government-provided emergency accommodation precisely because there are so many other factors at play when it comes to the number of people who are homeless. There are lots of different reasons people become homeless, including family breakdown, for example, and there are lots of different reasons it is difficult to lift people out of homelessness, although we are doing that all the time. What it did do is provide time. It provided tenants with a number of additional months to find alternative accommodation, where possible, and provided the Government with time, and we used that time. Over 6,000 new social houses were built in the last quarter of 2022 as well as the provision of extra emergency accommodation if needed.

The moratorium also caused real problems which should not be dismissed. People have not been able to move into the property they own. Some people coming home from abroad - 30,000 citizens every year - have been unable to move back into the homes they rented out before they left. People who have bought properties, often for their children to live in if going to college, will not be able to house their children that way in September, which is what Sinn Féin proposes. The ban also pushed more landlords into leaving the sector, and I believe it discourages new landlords from coming in, all making the supply situation, which is at the heart of this crisis, all the worse.

Sinn Féin's plan is clear. I have read its motion and I do not think it is a good one. I know that people will read the motion, but I ask them to consider it carefully before they vote for it if they choose to do so. It proposes to continue a ban on people being able to move back into their own properties and people being allowed to move children or family members back into their own properties. Sinn Féin has put in no exemption for that in its motion. Sinn Féin also says we should extend the ban until January because it believes that things can be made fundamentally different in such a short period. The truth is that it would probably just make matters worse than they are now. We might see even more landlords choosing to sell up, and that would be a mistake, or Sinn Féin would discourage more landlords from coming in.

Simply kicking the can down the road is not a housing policy, in my view. The solution to this is a different one. It is more social housing, which we are doing. It is the tenant in situ scheme, which we are doing. It is more supply such as through Croí Cónaithe and changes to the fair deal scheme. It is tax changes to encourage more landlords to stay in the market and more to re-enter it. It is also increasing funding for homelessness prevention.

We agreed in the countermotion today a number of things. We agreed there would be a tax package in the budget for small landlords, and that will take effect this year to encourage them to enter and to stay in the sector. This was after consultations with our parliamentary party and some of the Independent groups. We have agreed to extend the Croí Cónaithe refurbishment grant scheme for people who are doing up derelict properties for the purpose of renting them and those built prior to 2007. We have agreed that if people rent out rooms in their houses, it will not affect their social welfare entitlements or their medical card entitlements. That is open to local authority tenancies as well. We have also agreed, as I said earlier, to give local authorities the authority to buy up to 1,500 homes where people are facing a notice to quit. That will be a solution for many people.

When Deputy Varadkar re-entered the office of Taoiseach in December he said housing would be his priority. Now his first major housing decision is to put thousands of renters at risk of losing their homes. With his eyes wide open, the Taoiseach intends to lift the eviction ban knowing that it will spell disaster for so many. It will mean people losing their homes.

It will mean some looking for homeless emergency accommodation that is not there. For others, it will mean sofa-surfing or moving back into the box room of their parents' home with their children in tow. Either-or, we are looking at a tsunami of misery again visited on our people. Now, the Government cobbles together measures or reiterates schemes that are not working efficiently or to scale as some kind of appropriate response. It is not.

The Taoiseach sounds to me like somebody who has thrown in the towel and thrown renters to the wolves. He does not actually believe these things can be solved, but they can.

Hear, hear.

To protect renters, we need an extension of the eviction ban and we need Government pace and ambition. As a matter of fact, we need a new Government.

That much is evidently clear.

As is so often the case, the Deputy seems to think the solution to the housing crisis is just her being Taoiseach and her party being in government.

It would be a first step.

She puts no solutions forward in her contributions, nor does she do so in the Sinn Féin motion. It seems to me that she sees housing not as a crisis to be overcome, or a problem to be solved, but a political issue to be exploited. There are four things the Deputy could do to help, if she is interested in helping. One, she could stop objecting to new housing.

The Deputy objected to 2,000 homes in her constituency alone. Her party has objected to 12,000. She particularly objects to one-bedroom accommodation because the people who live in them are "transients", to use her language, and build-to-rent accommodation, even though we need more properties to rent.

She could drop her opposition to the help-to-buy and first home schemes. Many first-time buyers know an election is coming in the next two years and are starting to read about Sinn Féin policies. We had more first-time buyers in January than in any month since records began in 2010. They know Sinn Féin will take away the help-to-buy and first home schemes and are concerned about it. Sinn Féin should take that threat off their backs.

Where will the families go when they are evicted?

The third thing the Deputy can do is to stop threatening landlords with increased restrictions and regulations and more taxes. That will just cause more of them to leave the market.

Where will the families go?

Deputy McDonald could acknowledge that Sinn Féin's plan to extend the eviction ban until the end of January will do only one thing. It will make the situation worse but perhaps that is what she wants.

No, it will not. Continuing in government will make the situation worse.

We are way over time.

On 9 February, six weeks ago now, the Labour Party called for an extension to the eviction ban in our motion. The Government voted it down. It voted down our proposal for a series of constructive measures that would have served to increase the number of homes available to people. Despite positive indications the Government was going to extend the ban in the meantime, at the last minute it has confirmed that it will indeed lift it at the end of next week, in ten days' time. This decision is already causing immense distress and devastation to those families and renters throughout the country who are facing a cliff edge of eviction from 1 April.

Since our motion was defeated, answers to parliamentary questions we received confirmed that the Government did not undertake any modelling as to the effect its decision would have on increasing homelessness. The responses from the Government have also confirmed that the primary consideration for choosing the duration of the ban in the first place was that of weather, meteorological conditions, which is incredible. Further responses confirmed that no new or clear direction was given to local authorities by the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage to mandate the purchase of homes occupied by renters facing homelessness. In other words, the Government has wasted the breathing space afforded to it by the ban. It could have used the six months the ban was in operation to plan, put contingency measures in place, added extra homes for people and added extra conditionality to ensure, for example, that landlords moving back into their own homes could be catered for. It is extraordinary and incomprehensible to all of us that the Government instead went ahead and decided to lift the ban from the end of next week without any plan B or any contingencies.

Nothing the Government can float this week - and we have seen in the past 30 minutes apparently leaked details of the sorts of measures that will be in its countermotion - will help those who are due to lose their homes from the start of April. Nothing. No kite-flying this week will provide the reassurance parents who are contacting us need. These parents cannot bear the thought that they will have to take their children out of school because they simply cannot find another place to live in their own community. In my constituency, I hear from parents in this position. I hear from renters who will now face hours-long commutes because they cannot afford a home in a community near their workplace.

It is not too late, even now at the eleventh hour, to reverse the Government's decision and to extend the ban.

The Government should vote for the Opposition motion tomorrow, as it seems some Government Members are proposing to do. If the Government does not do so, the Labour Party has proposed a constructive alternative. As the Taoiseach knows, I wrote to him last Thursday with draft legislation which we are calling on the Government to move this week. Our legislation provides a mechanism to keep the ban in place until monthly homelessness reports show reductions for four successive months. This is a compassionate and evidenced-based approach. It is results-based rather than time-based and an approach that homelessness agencies have urged the Government to adopt.

Will the Taoiseach admit that the Government has made a mistake? Will he stop defending the indefensible and reverse his decision? If not, he will leave us with no choice but to table a motion of no confidence in his Government next week. This is a measure we do not take lightly but it is one which we believe is justified by reference to the devastation the Government’s decision is causing to so many thousands of families and renters around the country.

Hear, hear.

Hear, hear.

We were always clear when this was introduced that it was a temporary measure. If one reads the regulation, it says winter period. It was very clear that this was to be a temporary measure for the winter period and would end on a phased basis from 1 March. It gave tenants facing or receiving notices of termination a few more months to find alternative accommodation and gave the Government time to act, and we did act. Over 6,000 new social homes have been built. The tenant in situ scheme has been scaled up and a very clear direction has been given by the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage to the local authorities that we want that scheme used. It also allowed us to provide additional emergency accommodation in case it is needed.

There is one thing I think we all agree on. We all seem to agree that an eviction moratorium has to end at some point. No matter when it is ended, it will be difficult and problems will arise. The view from the Sinn Féin Party is that we should have a time-based extension until January and let us just hope it is better then.

Do your work.

Listen to the Labour Party proposals.

The truth is that extending the eviction ban until the end of January just means it is going to be much worse then and it will be in the middle of winter.

In fairness to the Labour Party, it has put forward a different proposal. It is proposing that the eviction ban can end if we see the number of people in emergency accommodation fall for four months. That needs to be thought through. It might fall by 50 in one month, ten in another month, 55 in the next month and perhaps two in the month after that. It might fall by as little as four. We would then lift the ban and what does the Labour Party think would happen then? It does not make sense.

All this is evidence-based.

It is very clear to everyone that once this was introduced, it was going to be very hard to unwind. I do not think it gets any easier by extending it until the middle of winter, which is January, or by waiting until the numbers fall by as few as four over a four-month period.

Do something about it.

The Government does not know what it is doing.

It is sitting on its hands.

The Taoiseach’s response and tone indicate the problem here. The renters listening to him now are the people who are facing the certain knowledge that from 1 April, a notice of termination will take effect, they will face eviction and there is nowhere else for them to go because there is a chronic shortage of housing across the country. We listened to the Taoiseach’s fatalistic tone suggesting there is nothing that could be done during an extended period of an eviction ban. The point is that the eviction ban was to give the Government a breathing space to put in place the necessary emergency measures to increase the supply of homes and ensure there would be a safety net for families facing the cliff edge of eviction. The Government has done nothing for the past six months and has apparently just waited to see what will happen. It is simply not good enough to take the same approach now of waiting to see what will happen when the ban is lifted without having any contingency plans or safety net in place for those families now facing homelessness who have already been served notices to quit. They are facing the human catastrophe and distress of losing their homes from 1 April. It is shameful to have taken this indefensible decision without any contingency plan.

That is not the position I am articulating. I do not agree that it makes sense to extend the eviction ban until the depths of winter at the end of January, when the situation-----

Wait until homelessness goes down.

-----could be even worse. I do not think waiting until the figure has fallen by maybe one person a month for four months makes sense either. The solution is a different one.

Is it better for homelessness to go up by 10,000?

The solution is more social housing. We built more social housing last year than in any year since 1975 and we will do more again. The solution is the tenant in situ scheme, with councils and approved housing bodies buying up-----

There have been seven of those this year.

-----homes in order that people can stay in them. The solution is more supply, which is why we are extending the Croí Cónaithe scheme to rental properties, changing the rules around the fair deal-----

The Taoiseach is reading from a press release.

-----and engaging on unactivated planning permissions. It is also why we have committed today to tax changes for small landlords that will take effect this year and will be in the budget later in the year. It is why we are investing in homelessness prevention services.

These are real solutions that will make a difference.

Where were they six months ago?

Different mechanisms to kick the can down the road definitely will not work.