People Before Profit representative ready to stand again in local elections

PEOPLE Before Profit’s Mayo representative has told The Mayo News he is considering running in next year’s local elections.

Joe Daly, who stood unsuccessfully in the last local and general elections, said he will put his name forward for selection to contest the next election.

Mr Daly, who works as a teacher in St Gerald’s College in Castlebar, added that candidate selection would be a matter for his party.

He received 437 first preference votes when he ran in the Castlebar municipal district area in 2019 before being eliminated on the eighth count.

In the 2020 general election, he received 721 first preference votes before being eliminated on the third count.

“I would consider running, definitely. I think it’s important that the left puts forward a strong opposition to not only the establishment parties but also the far-right, so I’ll definitely be considering it,” he said.

Mr Daly was speaking to The Mayo News while calling for the ban on no-fault evictions to be reinstated until the country gets ‘a good grip on the housing crisis’.

He cited figures which showed that Mayo has seen a 69 per cent increase in eviction notices since the ban was lifted. This amounted to 125 notices to quit in Q2 of 2023.

The number of people in homelessness nationwide reached record highs while the ban was in place.

A similar ban was instated during the Covid-19 pandemic, during which the number of people in homelessness fell.

Mr Daly said that tenants needed to be given additional rights on a permanent basis to avoid being evicted due to the sale of a property.

Last year, 60 percent of notices to quit were given due to the landlord selling the property while 14 percent were given because of issues with the tenant.

“We’ve seen a massive rise in those, as we predicted and we think that we’re going to see a very significant increase in the homeless figures if we don’t reintroduce that emergency response,” Mr Daly said.

He also echoed calls from his party for a right to housing to be enshrined in the constitution and for a state construction company to be set up to build social and affordable housing.

“We know there is a good percentage of small landlords who are fairly decent to their tenants. Fair enough, we accept that. But when the fundamental right to housing is not enshrined in the constitution then it’s very difficult for judges or those people dealing with evictions to actually weigh on the side of the tenant.”

Mr Daly also estimated that the housing crisis could be solved within ‘two to three years’ with appropriate government action.

“Until social and affordable housing has been built, until we’ve had a mass purchase of vacant properties, until dereliction has been dealt with, until that happens, you’re just going to see an escalation of this problem. We don’t see why we should allow people to be made homeless while the government are so slow in solving the crisis,” he said.

When asked about his party leader, Richard Boyd Barrett TD, objecting to numerous housing developments in Dublin, Mr Daly said his objections were ‘due to the lack of social and affordable housing in those developments’.

The Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown TD objected to over 1,300 houses in his constituency in two year, citing issues with the type of developments or the fact that they “breached county development guidelines”.

“With our policy we would have a state construction company that would be building social and affordable houses directly and there wouldn’t be a profit motive with them, so that issue wouldn’t arise,” Mr Daly said.