Residential Tenancies and Valuation Bill 2020: Committee and Remaining Stages
Seanad Éireann — 2020-07-31
============================================================

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

I wish to make a brief point. I am supporting Senator Ruane's recommendation. Our Part 4 protections are quite weak when compared to protections for tenants internationally.
There are multiple ways in which Part 4 has been chipped away at over the years in previous legislation relating to residential tenancies. There have been multiple exemptions and loopholes. There are many ways to get around people having Part 4 tenancies. Incentives have been given to landlords in various Finance Acts to carry out certain kinds of refurbishments. In these incentives, a balance was not struck between the benefits for landlords and preventing the erosion of the rights of Part 4 tenants, even though amendments were tabled which would have had this effect. We need to examine the issue of balance. The fact that the programme for Government mentions a right to housing should indicate a new perspective and a somewhat greater ambition with regard to how the question of balance is interpreted. As I said, we should be open to implementing what we believe to be good policy and then allowing people to challenge it if they wish to. This is important. I also concur that this is not necessarily about persons who are not paying rent but about recognising Part 4.

---

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