Residential Tenancies (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2026: Committee Stage Seanad Éireann — 2026-02-18 ============================================================ Chris Andrews (SF), Labour Panel It is on the public record. The Government has been taken hostage by companies and organisations such as this, and they are ensuring that this legislation is put through. Lorcan Sirr said the Government is trying to convince people that it will bring down rents by allowing landlords to put up rents. That is the reality. I look at the glass bottle site in Ringsend where 3,500 or, possibly, 3,800 new homes are to be developed. The only people who will be able to buy or rent them are the really wealthy and really high earners. I went to the glass bottle site and had a look. Those involved with the site kindly showed me around. The rent will be €2,500 a month for a one-bedroom flat. There are people who have lived in Ringsend all their lives. When it was not popular to live there, they made Ringsend the great community it is. What has happened? The Government is facilitating developers to come in and is allowing these units to be built, and the cost of them is absolutely insane. Very few people in Ringsend will be able to afford to rent of these one-, two- and three-bedroom apartments. A household would need to have two Senators' salaries in order to be able to afford to rent a one-bedroom apartment at the glass bottle site. This is having a huge impact. Where will people go? They have to leave their communities. They have to move or they are living in overcrowded conditions on Pearse Street and Kevin Street or in Ringsend because they cannot rent properties. They cannot afford to buy or rent. Not too far from here, 500 m away, there is a five- or six-storey building where a one-bedroom apartment costs €2,700 a month. How can anybody pay that? Beside that building is St. Andrew's Court, which the Government has been promising to regenerate, rejuvenate and redevelop for nearly ten years. It is still lying vacant in the middle of a housing crisis. Across the road from is the building to which I refer in which a one-bedroom apartment costs €2,500 or €2,700. It costs even more to rent a two-bedroom apartment there. That is what is happening in Ireland. There are the wealthy and there are the forgotten. Families in the inner city are being forgotten and pushed out because of policies such as those outlined in this rental Bill. How will families from Ringsend or Pearse Street ever be able to find homes? They have experienced decades of underinvestment in their communities. The community to which I refer has been there a long time. Before it was popular, they were there with the football clubs and the bingo. The latter is still being organised. During Covid, many of the families who live in the community were working on the front line. There were working in hospitals, they were in these Houses cleaning, they were working in Tesco and they were delivering essential supplies. None of these families will be able to afford to buy in their own communities. They cannot pay €2,700 rent. That is what is happening. The Government has just forgotten ordinary working-class communities in the inner city. It is not only in Dublin. It is in Limerick, Galway and Cork. Inner-city working-class communities have been forgotten and this Bill shows that and highlights how forgotten they are. As I say, rents will go up and up. The Government will talk about protection for renters. That is all very well but protection is only good if you can afford the rent and they will not be able to afford the rent. Sandymount is an affluent area. People would assume that it is a very wealthy area but young people cannot afford the rent. The average price of houses in Dublin was in the news today, with the headline, "Cost of buying a home in Dublin reaches €500,000". That is not according to Sinn Féin, but the CSO. An article states: The ... cost of buying a home in Dublin has now reached €500,000, according to the Central Statistics Office. Residential property prices rose by 7% nationally last year. It marks a slight deceleration compared to 2024, when the cost of buying a home rose by 8.7%. I suppose the Government will probably put out a press release stating that prices are not going up as fast as they were and looking for a clap on the back. The article continued: Residential property is now 178.8% above its low point in early 2013 after the financial crash. Prices are now 25% above their highest level at the peak of the property boom in April 2007. [...] Nationally, the median price of buying a home was €387,000 last year. Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown in Dublin was the most expensive area at €680,000. On those sort of eye-watering figures for homes, most people will know where Sandymount is. It is not too far away. Walk for a kilometre from here and you will be in Sandymount. People and their children in Sandymount are expected to pay €680,000 for a home in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown, such as in Blackrock. It is insane. The option is to stay at home because they cannot go out and afford to live in one of the overpriced rental units on the glass bottle site. According to the article, "Outside the capital, the most expensive region was Wicklow with a price of €454,000. The second most expensive was Kildare at €440,000", and "The least expensive was Donegal, where the price was €195,000." The way things are going, people from the inner city will only be able to afford to live in Donegal because they cannot afford to live in Ringsend, Sandymount, Pearse Street and Kevin Street. Even now, there is a site on Kevin Street. It was bought for some eye-watering multimillion euro sum. They were to develop it and build offices and apartments. They could not afford the financial model that they had paid out that money for and it is now derelict. It has been derelict for nearly two years. At the same time, across the road, on Bishop Street, in the Iveagh Trust buildings, they are expected to live in absolutely shocking conditions. There is dampness and mould in the tiny flats. You would not be allowed construct them these days, although, having looked at the Irish Glass Bottle, IGB, site, the one-bedroom apartments there are not far off them, but that is another story. When you look at the conditions in the Iveagh Trust, there are so many boarded-up flats. In the middle of a housing crisis, they are empty. It seems insane that people are expected to pay these massive bills. They are expected to pay eye-watering amounts in rent, such as €2,500 for a one-bedroom flat or apartment on the glass bottle site. I am not sure what the difference between an apartment and a flat is. They are both very expensive but a flat, in general, in the Dublin City Council area tends to be neglected and under invested in. On the Government investment, Pearse House residents put in a request because there was a regeneration plan. They got phase 2 of the regeneration plan in Pearse House. Residents were really looking forward to it. They have lived in shocking conditions for many years. They asked the Minister to meet them because the Minister had pulled the regeneration and said they were going to deep retrofit Pearse House. They have put in multiple requests to meet the Minister for housing and he has ignored them. --- 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