Paul Murphy: Demands eviction ban reinstated after tenant-in-situ cuts

Since you lifted the eviction ban in April 2023, more than 20,000 households have gotten eviction notices because their landlord wants to sell. At the time, you promised renters that they would be protected with the tenant in situ scheme. If they were on HAP or RAAS and their landlord was willing to sell to the council, the council would buy their home. That has turned out to be a lie. Just over 2,500 households benefited from the scheme before you gutted it, less than two years after it started. The results are seen in the figures in terms of homelessness. A massive rise from 12,000 in March 2023 to over 16,000 today, including over 5,000 children. In Q2 2024, 349 families were prevented from entering homelessness as a result of tenant in situ. Q2 2025, that is down to 122. Will you take emergency action, reinstate the eviction ban and re-implement the tenant in situ scheme and properly fund it? Thank you Deputy Tisha to respond. The experience is changing. We need to get with that. Deputy Amorto Koo housing adaptation grants. I talked to the Minister and I am well aware that we have had very substantial grants. Just to make the point to everybody, there has never been more capital allocated to housing and to this area. It is enormous funding. We are at limits of the growth in public expenditure, quite significant in terms of the overall fiscal framework, but adaptation grants are very important for senior citizens and very important for people with disabilities. Rural one-off housing guidelines are necessary. The Minister is working on those to update those, because we do need to give greater options for people living in rural Ireland, particularly on their own land. Given the cost of housing, that they would be in a position to develop housing for themselves and given the advances that have been made in wastewater treatment facilities, I think this is something that should be accommodated. I have dealt with Deputy Ward, we are not normalising anything. We are very clear that we need consistent and sustainable investment in housing in all aspects of housing in the time ahead. Deputy Murphy, I think if you maintain the eviction ban, you would suffocate supply, you would have less houses. We are not going down your agenda in many respects, because we think your agenda would be even more damaging and would not ensure an increase in house building, particularly in terms of the private sector. The 10-in-situ scheme has been very significant over the last two years, very significant, and it did need refinement so that it's not used by councils as an excuse just to acquire instead of build, and it has to be focused and targeted at those most in need. It was never meant for landlords to sell. The focus was always on tenants who were in danger of being made homeless, and examples have emerged. For example, in some local authorities, no sooner was a house acquired than enormous funds were immediately put into retrofitted and so on like that. That was never the original objective of that scheme. It was to get houses acquired to stop them being sold and to stop some of being made homeless. Some councils did not operate the scheme as it should have been operated. I know the opposition just want to keep on throwing money at every scheme and not review it, not examine it, and so on like that. There are issues that the minister did examine and found things which were not in our view in accordance with the original objectives of the scheme. The scheme has not been shelved or dropped as has been suggested. In many of the cases that have been raised, the city councils, and I tested this with one or two, some cases were raised in the house here, they got sorted. They got sorted because the council could sort it. And they are not helpless either. Move on then to