Residential Tenancies and Valuation Bill 2020: Committee and Remaining Stages Seanad Éireann — 2020-07-31 ============================================================ Victor Boyhan (IND), Agricultural Panel I do not want to be fighting with the Minister of State and I genuinely look forward to working with him. I also look forward to being on the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government. I do not know if I will be a member of that committee but I hope to be and will do everything I can to make that happen. I think I have a strong record on housing, planning and local government so I just want to say again what I have said before. It is important that we get this right. The great thing about this House is that it is on the record. I previously posed the question as to why there was such resistance to amendments in both the Dáil and the Seanad. That was the first thing I said. I then asked how many politicians are landlords. That was not to ask the Minister of State if he is a landlord. I know everyone who has land that we want. We have a process whereby politicians make declarations that are published every year in newspapers. Other things are also published but those declarations are on the record of the House and, I presume, are up on our website. There was no intention to suggest that the Minister of State is a landlord. Anyone is entitled to be a landlord. The Minister of State shared a statistic I did not know, that is, that up to 80% of landlords owned one or two properties. We are talking about many people who bought a little investment that could act as a pension, or whatever. I have always been an advocate of rental accommodation being provided by both the public and private sectors. I would not like the Minister of State to leave this House thinking that there was any slight or inference on him because that was not my intention. I want to clarify that because I would not want that impression to be given. However, I do ask a question which was also raised in the Dáil. I took the trouble to print off some of the transcripts from last night's Dáil debate. I want to make clear that there was no effort to in any way undermine the Minister of State or make any inferences and I would not like him to think that. Having said that, I think the question I asked is legitimate and I repeat it: how many of our politicians are landlords and why is there resistance to bringing in legislation? As the Minister of State has rightly said, it is a matter for the House. It is a matter for the Government to refuse to support the amendments. I accept that and have been around long enough to know that is the case. It is nonetheless disappointing and does not augur well for us, going forward, if every day we come into both Houses of the Oireachtas and are told we are not going to get support. It was not long ago when people were on different sides of the Houses. Opposition is a frustrating place to be, but we all have a job to do and a mandate. As the Minister of State rightly said, we all know first-hand of people who have difficulties. I wanted to clarify the matters to which I have referred and hope that the Minister of State will accept that clarification. --- 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