Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has denied that he overruled Housing Minister Darragh O’Brien’s wish to extend the eviction moratorium.
The claim was made by homeless advocate Fr Peter McVerry in a radio interview on Monday morning. The eviction ban came to an end on March 31 following a Cabinet decision taken in early March.
While there had been some early indications that the ban could be kept in place in some instances, it was fully lifted and a number of measures were announced by the Government to replace it. Speaking to South East Radio’s The Morning Mix Show, Fr McVerry suggested that Minister O’Brien wanted to keep the ban in place but he was "overridden" by the Taoiseach.
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He suggested that the Government’s attempt to put new measures in place was a "last-minute panic". Fr McVerry said: "This is just an appalling decision by the Government.
"My understanding is that the Minister for Housing wanted to extend and was acting in preparation for extending the ban but he was overridden by the Taoiseach. That's why there was no preparation made during the five-month ban for mitigating the effects of ending this.
"Now, the Government has said that the mitigating effects are going to be put into action, that landlords who want to sell their house will first have to engage with the local authority to see if the local authority will buy the house and keep the tenants in place. But that requires legislation. If they had intended to end the ban, why didn't they put that legislation into place during the five months when the ban was enacted? They didn't do it.
"It was a last-minute panic attempt to reassure the public that they had it under control and the irony is at the very same day that the eviction ban was to end, the Government goes on holidays for two weeks and can't pass any legislation. I am just so angry. The reason for ending the ban, I believe, is that the local and European elections are coming up early next year. They didn't want all this fallout to happen a few months before the elections.
"They wanted to get it out of the way by ending your eviction ban and hope that people's anger will have subsided in 12 months' time and the elections coming up." When asked if he was willing to stand over his statement, Fr McVerry said that he was not going to reveal the source of his information.
A spokeswoman for the Taoiseach denied the suggestion in a statement to The Irish Mirror. She said: "This claim is 100 per cent incorrect and without any foundation."
A spokeswoman for Minister O’Brien did not reply to request for comment.
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