Residential Tenancies (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2026: Committee Stage Seanad Éireann — 2026-02-18 ============================================================ Pauline Tully (SF), Cultural and Educational Panel I move amendment No. 1: In page 5, to delete lines 30 and 31, and in page 6, to delete lines 1 and 2 and substitute the following: “(2) Within three months of the passing of this Act the Minister shall lay before the Houses of the Oireachtas a report setting out the impact of the “market rent reset” provision contained in section 8 on rental inflation in the private rental sector.”. I have genuine concerns about this Bill, where it is going and what it will do for renters in this country. I am already concerned about affordability. Rents are very high all over the country. That is particularly the case in urban areas but elsewhere as well. It seems that no impact study was done on this Bill before it was produced as to what it was going to do to rents. The way I see it is that rents are only going to go one way. Many landlords in my constituency are small landlords. They might have a number of properties and most of them are generally fair. They might get a nice family in to rent and want to keep that family there, so they may not have increased the rent in some years. Suddenly this legislation comes in and it is going to change how things are done and the rent can only be raised for new tenancies every six years. If the tenants move out for whatever reason, and new tenants are moving in after 1 March, naturally they will raise the rent because they will not be able to raise it for another six years and may not have raised it for quite some time before that. I know many landlords in those circumstances. One landlord told me he has a number of properties. He was only charging €800 euro to a family for his property, whereas one neighbour was charging €1,500 and another was charging €1,600 for the same size house. He had not raised his rent. He was not that type of person. He said he was not greedy and he was not trying to profiteer off ordinary people because he did not think it was fair. However, he will obviously take the opportunity to raise it, maybe not as high as his neighbours, but to some extent. Many landlords will raise the rent to what we call market value when they get the opportunity. Looking at the figures from the Residential Tenancies Board for the average rent in each county, we know some places have lower rents and many places are much higher. The figures also show an average market rent. Going on those figures, it is possible that people may end up paying up to €3,500 extra a year in the first year and for subsequent years in a new tenancy in my county of Cavan. I do not know where they will get the money. I am hearing from families whose landlords are selling up because this legislation is so confusing and have issued eviction notices to people. Up to this, they had been charging them a reasonably fair rent. People come into my office and ask me where they are going to find a rental they can afford. They are looking but they cannot find anything because there is very little availability and what is available is very expensive. Many of these people are above the HAP rates and above the social housing threshold. They have to go on the private rental market without any sort of financial support and they cannot find anywhere to rent. Do they go into homeless accommodation or do they try to bunk in with family, squashed into one bedroom? It is an absolute nightmare for them. As I said, this legislation is not well thought out whatsoever. It will have an extreme impact on rent in the private rental sector. On students, I am about to see my son go off to college, I hope, in September. He will be looking for rented accommodation and we know there is very little student-specific accommodation or on-campus accommodation. If he is lucky enough to get that - and it is not cheap either - that would be great but if not he will be depending on the private rental market. It is a new tenancy every year because most students seek a nine-month tenancy. They move into the house at whatever the rent is and then they move out. Then they have to get another new tenancy for the following year. The rent will be raised again and again. I do not know how I will afford that if that is what happens next year and I know many other families will be in exactly the same position. This Bill will only drive homelessness higher because already we are talking about in excess of 16,000 people, of whom 5,000 are children. That is not even counting the people I have already spoken about who are bunking in the family box room or lying on the sofa of their friend's house or in domestic violence shelters or lying on the street. There are a lot more homeless than we actually see in those figures that are accessing emergency accommodation. Again, that figure will only rise because more and more people are going to be out on the street because they cannot afford the rent as it is and this Bill will drive rents up. We should have had proper analysis of any sort of legislation like this on what it will do to the rental market. We need regular monitoring and reporting of this Bill as we go forward. --- 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/2026-02-18/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:39+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-02-18