Student Accommodation
Dail Éireann — 2026-01-29
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James Lawless (FF), Kildare North

I intend to publish the national student accommodation strategy in the coming weeks. The strategy will support access to suitable housing for full-time students in publicly funded higher education institutions and aims to deliver additional student beds to meet projected demand out to 2035, without the need to have additional recourse to the private rental market. The aim behind the student accommodation strategy is to address the student accommodation requirements relating to purpose-built student accommodation without imposing additional pressures - the idea is to relieve such pressures - on the wider private residential sector.
The provisions relating to tenancy legislation fall under the remit of my colleague the Minister for housing, Deputy Browne. His Department sets the rules and implements the legislation relating to rent, rent resets and so forth. I have worked closely with the Minister to ensure that the legislation relating to the new rent pressure zones, RPZs, which was published on Tuesday, having been approved by the Cabinet, contains a provision to protect students by means of a three-year moratorium on rent resets within purpose-built student accommodation. As a result, we will avoid the scenario that was feared by many, including me, of an annual reset as students left their accommodation each summer. It would have been unfair to have such students facing rent resets. The legislation was predicated on the end of a tenancy. For student accommodation, we have predicated it on the property, which means that regardless of how many students come and go - and I expect that there will be a group of students coming in each year and that they will be replaced by another set of students the following year - they will not be facing annual resets. There will be a three-year moratorium for all those students in the purpose-built student accommodation sector. That is important, and I thank the Minister for housing for taking my submissions on board. We had detailed engagements on this matter and, as a result, that protection will be built in.
As well as rent protections, there are significant supports in terms of affordability. This was one of the reasons why I increased all the non-adjacent maintenance grants in the budget, thereby assisting 30,000 students and bringing the total allocation for the non-adjacent student grant to €146.5 million. There are also things like rent-a-room relief, the student assistance fund and significant other funding I have put in place for students in order to help them to meet their accommodation needs.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-01-29/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:34+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-01-29