Residential Tenancies (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2026: Committee Stage
Seanad Éireann — 2026-02-18
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Patricia Stephenson (SD), Labour Panel

I thank the Minister of State for being here. It was the Minister, Deputy Browne, who was here last week when we were on Second Stage of the legislation, so I will repeat some of the concerns about this Bill. It will be no surprise to the Minister of State that many in the Opposition do not support this Bill and do not see any evidence of how it is going to work. There is no evidence that it will bring down rents and that is why we are referring to it as the rent hike Bill, because in fact everything points to the fact that it going to increase rents which are already incredibly high. A series of amendments from me and other Social Democrats, Labour Party, Green Party and Sinn Féin Senators are all an attempt to make this Bill a little bit better. The Minister of State will probably not accept any of those amendments. That is what we saw play out in the Dáil last week, but the fact of the matter is this Bill cannot be made very much better, even with the small mitigations we are attempting. I stand to support this particular amendment, which is really just trying to bring a bit of evidence and actual analysis to what has been an incredibly rushed process. There was a minority report at the housing committee which laid out very clearly deep concerns about this Bill and what it will mean in terms of making rent incredibly unaffordable. I wish that the Minister of State will at least consider this idea of bringing some evidence and analysis so that we could come back to this. I suspect the answer is going to be "No". If we want to talk about evidence-based policy, we should be looking at reports and analysis so that we can assess the impact of the policy we are making on the lives of people who are going to be affected.

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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