Vote on city council introducing its own eviction ban set for April 19

A MOTION that Cork City Council should not evict its own council tenants was deferred to another special meeting on housing later this month, due to opposition.

Cork’s An Rabharta Glas leader, councillor Lorna Bogue, forwarded three motions concerning housing at this week’s meeting of Cork City Council.

Ms Bogue asked that her first motion be decided at the meeting rather than going to a committee meeting later.

Ms Bogue called on Cork City Council to maintain a moratorium on the eviction of social housing tenants “who are not in their probationary period, notwithstanding the Government’s ending of the national eviction ban”.

The motion was deferred to a meeting of a housing strategic policy committee (SPC) for debate on April 19 next, due to opposition from some members of Coalition parties Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, and the Green Party.

Ms Bogue said Cork City Council should extend its own eviction ban for its tenants, “because that’s something that is in our power to do.

“The council isn’t going out there and throwing people out on the street,” she said. “It’s very difficult to evict someone from social housing anyway.

“I thought for us as a housing authority, it would be important to use our own position within the market just to say that we don’t agree with the eviction ban being lifted, and we are going to put actions behind our words here, and we are not going to evict tenants.

“I requested a suspension of standing orders, instead of leaving it for a month or two months. A simple decision, a simple message: the Government has lifted the eviction ban, but we as a landlord are not going to do that.”

Some Fianna Fáil councillors supported the motion.

Cork City Council has around 8,000 housing units, with thousands more planned in the pipeline. “Us, as an institutional actor, messaging something like that would have calmed the market a bit,” said Ms Bogue.

Separately, Ms Bogue requested that Cork City councillors call on the chief executive to consider as part of their function, the hiring of a disability equality officer and an access and equality officer.

Ms Bogue also requested that Cork City Council write to the minister for housing and local government to “express frustration at the lack of information relating to the expected effects of the ending of the eviction ban for local authorities as providers of housing and homeless services”.

The motion stated that “the council is concerned at the lack of management information flowing from central Government which is necessary for proper planning for the anticipated increase in homelessness and demand for council services as a direct consequence of the eviction ban being ended”.