Rental Sector Dail Éireann — 2026-01-22 ============================================================ Conor Sheehan (LAB), Limerick City This legislation is going to dramatically increase rents. The fact of the matter is that we have an inbuilt deficit of well over 200,000 homes. The Minister is talking about incentivising private sector investment but he is not going to be able to incentivise enough investment within the lifetime of this Oireachtas to bring rents down. Rents need to come down. Students, in particular, are going to be punished by this as they are forced to take up a new lease every year. The average length of a tenancy in this country is three and a half years. What specific public modelling has the Department done on this? Other than the Housing Agency report into RPZs, no specific modelling is available to forecast what these changes will do, which is send rents through the roof. --- 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/dail/2026-01-22/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:32+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-01-22