Residential Tenancies (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2026: Committee Stage Seanad Éireann — 2026-02-18 ============================================================ Laura Harmon (LAB), Industrial and Commercial Panel I thank the Minister of State for engaging in this debate. Where do we even start with this Bill? We put down sensible amendments in the Dáil from the Labour Party. We are bringing them to the Seanad now as well. I am sure they will not be supported by the Government. We have called for this legislation to be scrapped. We simply do not believe that it supports renters. We do not believe it will work. It sides with big developers, big landlords and vulture funds over the average small landlord and, certainly, it is not on the side of renters. We know average tenancies end after three and a half years, not six years, so we will know there will be more frequent market resets. The Government has admitted that itself. It brought in a rent credit because it knows renters are struggling. It has already acknowledged that by bringing in a rent credit, which I would argue needs to be increased. Rents are going to go up because of this legislation. The Government seems to be coming up with all different ideas on how to solve the housing crisis but nothing seems to be working. This is another one of those ideas. We had the idea of the housing tsar before; I do not know what that was about. This is causing a huge amount of confusion for renters and for small landlords. I am a renter myself. I live with my landlord currently and we are both confused by this legislation. We are both very confused as to what is going to happen. The general public is very confused. There needs to be a whole review of renting in Ireland. There is this idea that renting is this transient thing that people do but people have been renting in this country now for decades. People who do not want to be renting are trapped in renting. A lot of people aspire to owning their own properties. It is not everybody but a lot of people aspire to being able to own their own home one day. We cannot have a whole generation of pensioners renting in the future. I have said it a million times. This is an absolute poverty ticking time-bomb. I do not know what we are going to do when we have a generation of pensioners who are renting in this country with an ageing population. The average house nowadays costs over eight times the average annual salary. The word "mortgage" itself comes from a term from the Middle Ages that means death pledge. Essentially, we will be paying mortgages until we are almost dead and past the age of retirement at this stage. Many banks will accept that. They are lending beyond the average age of retirement because they know people are going to have to be working longer in order to pay off these mortgages, these death pledges we are signing up to. Ultimately, the cost of housing is going to have to come down. We need to accept that. We need to make housing more affordable for people. People are paying money into rent when they could be paying more money into our economy. They are paying it to private landlords and developers when they could be spending it in their communities. They could have it in saving accounts that could be accruing interest but instead they are paying off other people's mortgages. As I said before, there is a huge transfer of wealth happening in this country between renters and those who are renting out their properties. We need to have a sea-change in how we approach housing in this country and how we approach the issue of renting. The word "landlord" is even outdated. They are not lords. It is an imperialistic term. It implies a huge imbalance in power which exists. We absolutely need to review that. It is archaic. We saw a report yesterday from Sherry FitzGerald that there is a deficit of nearly 39,000 when it comes to student accommodation beds in Ireland. I was president of the national students' union 11 years ago. There was a huge issue in terms of the availability of student accommodation then. It has got so many times worse now to the point where many students cannot even afford to rent. They do not have access to accommodation. There has been a huge skew towards the private sector to solve this but the private sector is not going to dig us out of the hole we are in. We have to have a more active role from the State in terms of building, working with local authorities and getting homes built because ultimately it will be a supply issue. We are talking about renters now but the whole thing is connected. I was at a press conference in Buswells Hotel this morning, which I attended with members of the disabled community and students who are calling for an emergency payment for disabled people. We know the last budget has made disabled people in Ireland less well off. Disabled organisations estimate that they are less well off by €1,400. I was extremely sad to hear from a young man at that conference that as he could not afford to heat his home, he had to go out and buy an extra blanket to sleep in. He has to chose between eating and heating. That is the sad state of affairs we are at in this country. There should be social floor under which nobody can fall but the floor is gone. There is no floor. There are people in employment now who are falling into homelessness. I was talking to a plumber in Cork South-Central who was housed one week and was homeless the next. The reality here is that people renting are falling into homelessness. I do not need to tell the Minister of State about Cork and the availability of properties at a council level that are suitable for people who are disabled in order to live independently. That is a whole other issue about their economic independence and to be able to live independently. I am meeting people week in, week out, where there are three generations in the one house. This is a wealthy country. We are a wealthy country but that wealth is not going into the pockets of ordinary people. I do not know what the Government will do in the next budget. Will it introduce another small rent credit? That is not going to help with the cost of living and the cost of renting. We believe this legislation is going to make these costs worse. I wish I could say I believed it was going to work. If we thought it would work we would not be opposing it but this is genuinely going to make things more difficult for people who are renting. That is why we called for it to be scrapped. We have brought amendments to try to make it better in whatever way we can but unfortunately, the Government is not supporting that. Not only has the Government been reliant on the private rental market and private investment but it is fair to say that the Government has been reliant on emigration to an extent. It is almost like we need people to leave the country; it is just not working. As the eldest of five girls, three of my younger sisters have left Ireland because they do not want to be paying extortionate rents. They do not see home ownership in their near future and things like public transport do not even work, so they left the country. I hope they will be able to come back one day and that they may be able to afford to buy their own home. For the minute, there are a lot of people in this case. We have the highest outward levels of migration since 2015 in this country. Meanwhile, the Government is also blaming immigration for the housing crisis. We have heard from Fine Gael in particular that immigration is contributing to the housing crisis whereas a lot of people who are coming into the country are key workers and are propping up our healthcare system because we are losing our own key workers at the same time. We are losing teachers, healthcare workers and members of the Garda from this country because they cannot aspire to own their own homes. They are going to places like Dubai where they may have a better standard of living, instead of being trapped in renting with no prospect of owning their own homes in Ireland. We will be opposing this Bill as we did in the Dáil but we urge the Minister of State to consider the amendments that are being put down. These are sensible amendments that need to happen. --- 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