Protests don’t help homeless, says Leo

Taoiseach rebukes housing campaigner Fr McVerry

PROTESTS won’t change anything for the homeless, Leo Varadkar has said when challenged on the housing crisis.

The Taoiseach was asked about homeless supporter Fr Peter McVerry’s backing for Take Back the City, the activists who occupied a number of vacant houses in Dublin and encouraged others across the country to do likewise.

In an interview this week, Fr McVerry said the protests are a ‘very effective way of raising awareness about the failure of Government to address this problem properly’.

He said it should be illegal for banks to evict people for as long as it takes the Government to get a handle on the crisis. Fr McVerry said that until such a measure is brought in people are entitled to take whatever action they wish, to avoid being evicted, provided it’s non-violent and there’s no damage to property.

Speaking yesterday at the Ploughing Championships, where he was heckled and shouted at by a housing protester, Mr Varadkar told the Irish Daily Mail: ‘In any democracy, protest is legitimate. But protest in all cases should be peaceful, and also should be done in accordance with the law.

‘Ultimately protests don’t build houses or build them any quicker, unfortunately.

‘They can highlight issues but, in themselves, they are not going to help us build houses any quicker.’ The Taoiseach added: ‘But we are building houses. This year we will build 20,000 new homes, more than any year in the last ten.

‘We will also increase our social housing stock by about 8,000, more than any year this decade. We have a lot to catch up on, the population is increasing. There is pent-up demand. We will get there, but it can’t happen overnight.’

He said he didn’t support Fr McVerry’s proposal that nobody should be evicted for the next three years. ‘I don’t think anybody wants to see anyone evicted from their property,’ he said.

‘But we have to bear in mind evictions can happen for all sorts of different reasons. Sometimes people can pay their rent, can pay their mortgage but don’t.

He said: ‘That is unfair because very often that rental mortgage could be somebody’s pension for example. Sometimes people are evicted because of reasons of anti-social behaviour, where one household could be causing trouble for an entire neighbourhood or an estate.

‘So there are to the lots of reasons why evictions would occur and for those reasons I don’t think a blanket ban is workable.’

He added: ‘Certainly eviction orders go to court. But the courts take a very sympathetic view of people who genuinely can’t pay.’

‘One house could be causing trouble’