Student Accommodation
Dail Éireann — 2026-01-29
============================================================

James Lawless (FF), Kildare North

Students living in the private residential sector have the same rules as anyone else living in that sector. This is something I have looked at and discussed with the Minister, Deputy Browne. I have a limited remit because the Minister for housing and the Department of housing have full control over the rental rules and landlord and tenant legislation. I make submissions and I have engagement with them, as I successfully did in the case of purpose-built student accommodation, PBSA.
With regard to the private residential sector, there are challenges in trying to come up with student-specific rules for houses in which students might be living. To take a typical three-bed, semi-detached house in one of the university towns as an example, of which there are many in Maynooth in my constituency as well as all around the country, how can it become a student house if four people are living there, two of whom are students and the other two are working? What happens if there are three people in a house and one of them is doing a course at night? Similarly, I refer to houses in which there are a couple of student doctors or teachers on their first year of placement. Are they student houses or not?
I will be publishing my strategy in the coming weeks. I would have liked to have published it by now but it is complex with regard to the rules. I have implemented a number of the measures within it already, such as the increase in grants that I spoke about to help with affordability. Purpose-built student accommodation is the sector I will be focusing all my efforts on to deliver more beds.

---

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/2026-01-29/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:34+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-01-29