Residential Tenancies (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2026: Second Stage Seanad Éireann — 2026-02-12 ============================================================ Tom Clonan (IND), University of Dublin I am going to address the Bill from the perspective of disabled citizens. I will make some brief points and leave some questions for the Minister in regard. I acknowledge the points that the Senator made about the construction of houses. I know that we have not reached the targets that were set out. As a father to four adult children aged from 25 down to 18, I do recognise and acknowledge that an effort is being made to address the building of social and affordable housing. However, it is also clearly and patently not enough and I imagine that is something that we all agree on. There are 16,900 homeless people in Ireland and the homelessness phenomenon is intimately linked to the provisions of this Bill because in order to buy a one-bedroom house or apartment in Dublin, a person needs to be in the top 10% of earners in the EU. To buy a two-bedroom house or apartment, he or she needs to be in the top 1% of earners within the EU. This basically puts a home or an apartment beyond the reach of most Irish citizens. I have a 25-year-old, a 24-year-old man who is disabled, a 21-year-old-daughter and an 18-year-old son and they cannot reasonably expect to own a home within the next five to six years. All of the life decisions that they would like to make are out of their control. We know that shelter is a functional prerequisite for human self-actualisation. In Maslow's hierarchy of needs, shelter is right there among the top. If as a society and a political collective, we cannot provide shelter and homes for our citizens, it is by definition a dysfunctional society. We have to recognise that this is a crisis that requires an emergency response and emergency intervention. The homeless crisis fits the definition of what constitutes an emergency as set out by the Government in 2007 in a booklet that went to every home in the country. We have an emergency, a crisis, but I do not see the assets of the State mobilised in the manner in which they should be in order to respond to this emergency as they were in the financial crisis, for example, when we had the intellectual honesty to recognise that our financial system had become so dysfunctional that it required the Irish citizens to bail out the banking debt, so the debt was socialised. If we could do that for financial institutions, surely we can do it for our citizens in regard to the provision of affordable and social housing. I grew up in Finglas. In 1970, before Ireland joined the European Union, before we had a pot to produce something into and when Ireland was still the land of the candlestick and the pitchfork, we were building thousands and thousands of social and affordable housing units every year. I remember standing on Ballygall Avenue in Finglas with my sister in 1970 and seeing prefabricated housing units on the backs of lorries at the end of Ballygall Avenue going through Finglas village to Finglas south and Finglas west. My sister thought they were dolls’ houses. They were not perfect. Finglas south, Finglas west and other parts of Finglas have had social problems but at least people had a home. They had a roof over their heads. For human capital, you absolutely must have a home in order to thrive and to make a contribution to society. I come from a Finglas where hundreds of thousands of people like me have made a valuable and worthwhile contribution to Irish society. For people who do not have a roof over their heads or are in insecure rental accommodation or in a family hub or homelessness provision, that human capital is lost. My father was a garda. He put five of us through university on a garda's wage. He was also able to buy a house in the community he policed. The average rents in Dublin of €2,178 per month in the city centre and €2,320 per month in the greater Dublin area put such rental accommodation beyond the reach of teachers, gardaí, nurses and most public servants. While I recognise this is an attempt to deal with some of the fundamental, underlying causes of rent insecurity and the fear of being evicted, it has echoes going back to the 19th century when we looked for fair rent, fixity of tenure and freedom to move. Imagine, here were are in the 21st century and over a period of maybe two decades, we have lost those principles. The concept of house ownership, fixity of tenure and fairness of rent has evaporated. Respectfully, I absolutely accept the Minister’s sincerity and his bona fides. I know the Government is trying to do something about this but it is not enough. My questions about disability are as follows. Does this Bill protect disabled citizens? One in four homeless people is disabled. On average, disabled citizens are on the waiting list for social housing for in excess of ten years. Approximately 1,500 disabled citizens under the age of 65 are inappropriately placed in nursing homes in Ireland, some of them for as long as 20 years, because they cannot get accessible housing units. Does the Bill reinforce or correlate with the provisions in the national housing strategies for people with disabilities from 2011 to 2016 and from 2016 to 2021 and the newly published national strategy for housing for disabled citizens up to 2027? Are disabled citizens protected or enhanced in any way? Has the Bill been referenced to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities? Is it commensurate with the legal requirements the State has in relation to participation in society and inclusion in communities for disabled people? I have had a cursory look at the Bill and it does not. That is a missed opportunity and a failure here. I commend the Government’s attempts to deal with this but we need to do more. We have to declare this an emergency and mobilise the assets of the State in the manner that we did for the financial crisis. --- 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/2026-02-12/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:37+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-02-12