Residential Tenancies and Valuation Bill 2020: Second Stage Seanad Éireann — 2020-07-31 ============================================================ Barry Ward (FG), Industrial and Commercial Panel I intended to specifically address section 14 but, having listened to the debate, there are a couple of other points I wish to discuss. I have been struck by the piety of some contributions, particularly on the part of Sinn Féin Senators, and the contradictions contained therein. As is their wont, and as they did before the election, those in Sinn Féin promise everything but are not in a position to deliver anything. In fact, the vacant promises we have heard from them are more damaging than anything else. We heard from one Senator that this Bill must not be allowed to continue because it will remove caps on rents and enable evictions. A second Sinn Féin Senator stated that the Bill would drive landlords from the market. Nothing is surer to drive landlords from the market than a situation in which they cannot control the rent they are levying and have no way of dealing with tenants who wilfully refuse to pay it. Such tenants do exist. Landlords are expected to just suffer through it. The reality is that all of these provisions are balances of rights, in most cases between a tenant and a landlord. Landlords are not always bad. Many landlords in Ireland are small individuals with one or two properties. Some did not even intend to become landlords. They are all beholden to the banks. Perhaps that is the root of the problem. No quarter is ever given by the banks to people who are having difficulty in paying their mortgages. Many of us have been here before. I have previously stated that the banks will give a borrower an umbrella on a sunny day and ask for it back when it rains. They do not care about people. They do not care about small landlords or the tenants who are beholden to them. They are a major part of the problem. I also want to respond to something Senator Higgins said. I respect her contribution and I agree entirely with what she said about allowing local authorities to do their job and to become the housing agencies they were in the past. The Minister of State and I have had this conversation before. Part of the problem is the right to buy. I have been a strong supporter of that in the past because it is a really important opportunity to allow certain families to move beyond the particular place that they are in, but the other side of that coin is that it significantly reduces the stock that is available to local authorities on an ongoing basis. That should be examined. I implore the Minister of State, in a broader context, to empower local authorities, specifically to empower the members of those local authorities, the councillors, throughout this country who want to do good things for the people they represent, to action the things they need to action to get solutions on the ground in areas that they know better than anyone. The Custom House needs to release power to local authorities to allow them to do a better job on the ground than they are being allowed to do at the moment. That is a really important part as well. I wish to speak about section 14, which is the last section in the Bill. Essentially, it makes amendments to the Valuation Act. This is something I discussed with the then Minister, Deputy Eoghan Murphy, around the beginning of the lockdown due to the Covid situation. It specifically applies to my former local authority, Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown. The valuation system in and of itself is an antiquated one. It involves the juxtaposition of the Department of Finance in one regard and the local authority in the other in the creation of commercial rates. A local authority strikes the annual rateable valuation, the multiplier essentially of the valuation applied by the Department of Finance or the Valuation Office, which I think has now moved out of the Department of Finance. The difficulty is that the Act requires a revaluation every five to ten years. The maximum it can be is ten years. What this does, essentially, is it delays the revaluation in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown by up to a further two years. That is really important because we are in such a state of flux at the moment that the inflexibility of the Valuation Act means that the Valuation Office has to proceed with the valuation, notwithstanding the fact that right now it is very difficult to assess the real value of property. Unfortunately, we had this ten years ago in Dún Laoghaire because the revaluation took place for us in 2010 and at that time the marker for the valuation of properties was the 2007 figures, which was pre-bust, which meant that one had a situation whereby properties were revalued at massive rates and almost every retail business in the county saw a significant increase in their rates. Revaluations are always supposed to be revenue-neutral for the council, so it increased the rates for some and decreased the rates for others. What actually happened was the rateable valuation of the retail properties went through the roof and those retailers could not afford the rates increases. They appealed them to the Valuation Office and subsequent to the rate having been set by the council, their rates were reduced, which meant that Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council was left massively out of pocket. I am really pleased this provision is included in the Bill because it will mean that is less likely to happen again, but in the broader context we should be looking at the Valuation Act and whether the rigidity of it is appropriate or if we should be giving more flexibility to local authorities. --- 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