Richard Boyd Barrett accompanying tenants to RTB for hearing today
In a statement this morning Richard Boyd Barrett TD has said he is accompanying tenants to an RTB hearing today to appeal the decision by a vulture fund to evict 8 tenants in Dún Laoghaire.
The TD said, not only was it outrageous to evict people in the middle of a pandemic, but he also accused the landlord of “cynically exploiting” loopholes in the Residential Tenancies Act.
The Dún Laoghaire TD slammed the government for not closing these loopholes, despite the many examples of them being used by unscrupulous landlords.
The tenants of St Helen’s Court in Dún Laoghaire have been resisting attempts by the landlord to evict them since early 2017. There are 20 apartments in the complex and the landlord has been using various different strategies to get the tenants out. There are now only ten homes left occupied and the other 10 are empty. The landlord has only served eviction notices on 8 tenancies which seems to be a deliberate move as to evict all ten would go against the “Tyrrelstown Amendment” which insists that if a landlord wants to sell a block of apartments and there are 10 or more of them occupied that sale must proceed with the tenants in situ.
Richard Boyd Barrett TD said: “It is just outrageous that these tenants are facing yet another attempt to get them out of their homes. The current vulture fund and the previous landlord have been cynically exploiting the loopholes in the Residential Tenancies Act to try and get these tenants out in order to either sell or re-let at a much higher rent.
“The vulture fund that owns the block is claiming that they want to sell 8 of the 20 apartments and are using this grounds of sale to evict the 8 tenants. This is just not credible, there are 10 empty apartments that have been lying there for nearly 2 years. If they want to sell apartments, why not sell the empty ones. This manipulation of the law to increase their profits is just unacceptable and the fact that they are actually proceeding with this in the middle of a pandemic, makes the whole thing worse.
“I will be attending a number of hearings this week with the 8 tenants, and I will be there at 2.15pm today with a tenant who has been living in St Helen’s for 13 years and is determined to fight this eviction to the very end.”