Residential Tenancies and Valuation Bill 2020: Second Stage
Seanad Éireann — 2020-07-31
============================================================

Alice-Mary Higgins (IND), National University of Ireland

Those are the fundamental lessons. Within that, this Bill is looking at private rental. I recognise and this is good that there is an extension to some measures and in respect of rent. There are some positive elements in this Bill but they are deeply undermined by a couple of those same negative core assumptions which are there as legacies. I am not going to slam any Government party or person for how they act on this but we need to learn and to challenge the assumptions. We do not accept everything as given because it did not work in the past.
Some of the really problematic aspects are sections in this Bill which we will try to amend. Due to the poor timing of this Bill the Minister of State is not able to do them but I ask him to consider not commencing them. There are fundamental problems on the mistreatment of renters where they are required to sign declarations which could make them criminals. At a time of fear in a crisis this creates more fear. We do not do that for most other people. If a landlord, for example, under this Bill gives an inaccurate rental notification there is a presumption of good faith in so many areas but this simply states inaccuracies. These refer to inaccuracies as to what payments they are on. To be honest, it was very unclear to many members of the Government how some of those payments were working. Is the jobseeker's payment an income supplement? If one is on the working family payment, does that count? There are so many questions, ambiguities and a lack of clarity around some of these payments. There are also many very vulnerable people who can still be evicted.
We heard about the small owner, the older person who has one property that he or she rents out. There are also older people who have no property and who might be evicted. I am also worried about them and what it might be to be of a cocooning age, walking the streets trying to get a new place to live in Ireland. Those people matter and the Bill does not address them.
One further point as I come to the end of my time - we will get to address all of these points in the course of this debate - is on the question of property rights. It is time to start moving on this. We know that there are rights such as common good, family life, and right to privacy, all of which are in the Constitution. The State needs to start testing this. It is acknowledged in the programme for Government in its commitment to the right to housing because people need the right to housing and it is something that the State needs. As a preamble to that referendum, which I hope comes very soon, let us start taking test cases and let the State start making good decisions and good policy that we know is for the common good. If landlords want to challenge this, let them challenge it and let this take us through the courts and see what they have to say. That will be useful information in how we frame that right to housing when we put it into the Constitution, as is long overdue.

---

Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2020-07-31/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:48:31+00:00
Sitting date: 2020-07-31