Residential Tenancies (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2026: Second Stage Seanad Éireann — 2026-02-12 ============================================================ Laura Harmon (LAB), Industrial and Commercial Panel Is the Government codding itself? What planet does this Government live on if it thinks it is solving this housing crisis? Context is everything. At present, over 17,000 people are homeless in this country, of whom 5,500 are children. There has been a 100% increase in rents since 2016 and the average rent in Cork is now €2,200. To buy a house in this country, it costs over eight times the annual salary. Earlier a Senator said that people of a certain vintage will remember when the housing supply was better. I suggest that those people of a certain vintage, or a certain "mintage", also need to look to the future and realise that a whole generation has been locked out of security. We cannot have a whole generation of pensioners renting in the future in Ireland. This is a poverty ticking time bomb. If renting is so good then why do only eight Members of the Oireachtas rent? I am one of them. To be clear, these laws primarily are being made by people who own their own properties. I try to make measured contributions in this House. I am being measured and fair today but we need to see real solutions here. Last night, the Government rejected sensible amendments to this legislation. We will bring forward more on Committee Stage in the Seanad but I am hearing a lot of blame from the Government. They are blaming the Opposition and immigration for the problems in housing but we need to work together to solve this. We, in the Labour Party, have called for a rent freeze while we increase property supply. We know that allowing rents to be reset to market value will ensure that rents will increase for many tenants. We also know that the six-year tenancy reset will not work because the average duration of a tenancy lasts three and a half years so we will see market resets before that. We also have no clarity when it comes to student accommodation. I have been told that they might be reset in three or four years so we need clarity on how that will affect the rental market. This has caused a lot of confusion for renters and landlords. I believe that this legislation very much favours big landlords, big developers and vulture funds more than the average small landlord in this country. This morning, the Simon Communities in Ireland published a new report which said that for the first time ever since they have collected data, there are currently no properties available to rent, using the standard housing assistance payment, across the 16 areas surveyed. That fact is really worrying. We all need to work together to improve the situation for renters and anyone who wants to buy property in this country. It is really concerning that we are losing key workers in health and education now in Ireland due to the housing crisis. We are losing health workers, teachers and gardaí because wages are not keeping pace with the cost of living and the price of renting in this country. We have too many people who are trapped in renting. There has been a phenomenal transfer of wealth in Ireland, in particular over the last decade, between those who rent and those to whom renters pay rent and this is a generational issue. For the first time in many generations, we will have younger people who will be less well off than their parents. I meet people in the Cork South-Central constituency in clinics who tell me that they have three generations living in the one house. There are the grandparents, their children who are trying to start a family and then their children. Some of them live in the one bedroom. These are the kinds of current living situations in this country, which is wealthy and the rent crisis and rent rules contribute towards this situation. I do not believe that this legislation will fix the problem and believe it will make things worse. --- 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