Residential Tenancies (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2026: Second Stage Seanad Éireann — 2026-02-12 ============================================================ Chris Andrews (SF), Labour Panel This Bill is another attack on private renters, who have been completely neglected and taken advantage of by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. If this Bill is passed, thousands of people will be forced to pay higher rents at a time when families and workers are already struggling with the cost of living. We do need measures that will give tenants long-term stability but not in the way proposed by this Bill, which will result in higher rents for those starting new leases. Likewise, we do need to incentivise private investment in our housing system, but not in this way, which will only benefit unaffordable, elite-level apartments that are not available to the vast majority of prospective tenants. This Bill is deeply flawed from top to bottom and is not a step towards resolving the housing crisis. According to the RTB, this Bill will result in an annual rent increase of over €3,600 per year for new tenants in Dublin city. The average monthly rent in Dublin is already €2,200 and this will allow landlords to increase this amount by hundreds of euro every month. How are people going to afford that? Private renting is already not an option for a huge number of people in this city. They have simply been priced out. If you are from the inner city, what hope do you have of renting a home in the area where you and your family have lived all your life? Renting your own apartment in the inner city would cost thousands. The average rent for a one-bedroom apartment at the glass bottle site is just over €2,500 a month. That is absolutely insane. At an apartment block 500 yd from here, the rent charged for a one-bedroom unit is €2,700 a month. That is incredible. You would be lucky to even find a room in a shared apartment for less than €1,000 per month. Even then, you are likely to be living in squalor. A huge number of people in this city cannot afford to rent privately but are not able to access social housing. They make too much for social housing but not enough to get on the housing list. They are left in limbo. Even for those who qualify for social housing, the list is years or even decades long. We do not have nearly enough public homes to meet the need. For many people, their only option to get by is to live in their family home, potentially for decades, or to try to find a HAP property. It is worth remembering that the HAP scheme was supposed to be a stopgap measure to patch up some of the holes in our social housing systems. Nowadays, this scheme is completely dysfunctional. It is nearly non-existent, with only a handful of properties available in Dublin for hundreds, if not thousands, of applicants. The reality is that successive Governments’ failure to invest in our permanent public housing stock has resulted in a broken social housing system that cannot meet demand, resulting in more pressure on the private rental market, which in turn is inflated by State subsidies like HAP. It really is hard to see any hope for people to afford to live in this city under this Government unless they are very wealthy. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have rammed through several Bills relating to the rental market in the past number of years, and every single one has resulted in ever higher rents and a worsening housing situation. This Bill is clearly another favour to investors, developers and big landlords. Everyone else is yet again being left to deal with the consequences. Renters have got absolutely nothing from this. No progress has been made since the crisis began. We desperately need legislation to freeze rents across this country, to provide relief to tenants, to get social housing built and to make existing housing available and affordable to renters and buyers. This Bill is a absolutely disgraceful legislation. I hope the Government parties eventually wake up to the disastrous failure of their developer-led approach to housing in this State. The Government says the market will solve the housing crisis. That is not the market's job but the Government's. The Government has failed. It has failed renters and communities right across the State. It is just not acceptable. We need something to give renters some relief and some certainty. I know the Minister will say this Bill does give certainty but it does not. It increases rents and provides no certainty into the future. --- 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