Residential Tenancies (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2026: Committee Stage Seanad Éireann — 2026-02-18 ============================================================ Chris Andrews (SF), Labour Panel The haste with which this Bill has been undertaken is disappointing. We talk about democracy and commitment to the institutions we are elected to, yet a Bill this important will go through the Seanad and Dáil and be in place for 1 March. I presume that is the objective. We have Committee and Report Stages, and they are all being rushed through. I suspect the Government is going to guillotine the Bill if it is not going through fast enough and if Members are talking, analysing and examining various aspects of it. This is the most substantial change to the regulation of the private rental sector in over a decade and the Government is pushing it through over a few weeks in the Houses. I could be wrong there, but my understanding is that it will be guillotined and there will be no respect. The Bill is going to have a massive impact. I meant to say earlier that when we look at students, we know the overwhelming majority of them do not live in the student-specific accommodation sector but in the private rental sector. Typically, they are seeking a lease for nine months and not 12 months. Come September, they are going to get hit substantially again. The vast majority of families in Donegal, west Cork and Mayo do not have access to specific student-built accommodation. There is some. I know UCD is building more. Each year, it builds a few more units, but it just does not meet the demand from students. Young people leaving west Cork, Donegal or Mayo are looking forward to going to college, getting a little bit of independence, meeting new friends, going out and enjoying the nightlife, studying, being educated and becoming independent. What will happen to them is that they will not be able to afford it because rents will be going up and up. Security of tenure is not going to be a huge factor for these students, but the cost will have a major impact on them. The cost of rents will be an issue for young students coming up to Dublin or going to Galway, for example, if they are in the midlands or Dublin and travelling. They are eating into the private rental market. They are going to be very much impacted by this change. The Bill's impact on third level education is one aspect of this issue. Up to a little while ago, I was on the board of a school in Rathmines. It has struggled to get teachers to come up and teach in the Harold's Cross-Rathmines area because they could not afford the rents. The same goes for nurses, doctors and pharmacists. People in the medical and educational sectors cannot afford it. Schools cannot get teachers and principals now because of the rents. Those individuals cannot afford the rents they are expected to pay. A teacher is not going to be able to afford a one-bedroom apartment down in the glass bottle site, where the rent is €2,500 a month, or just down off Fenian Street, where the rent sought is €2,700. More supply might come on stream in Dublin, but ordinary people will not be able to afford it. Teachers, guards and doctors will not be able to afford it. What use is bringing on stream all these units? More and more, it is creating a two-tier society, where if people have money, they will have accommodation, but if they do not have money, they will not have accommodation. They will be subjected to living in local authority housing that is being neglected and forgotten about. Dublin City Council recently said that it was going to cost €400 million or €500 million to move the civic offices from the quays up to the site on Kevin Street and to develop that site. That is great. Happy days. However, how can the council manage to find the millions of euro required to develop the Kevin Street site when across the road 79 apartments are lying empty in the middle of a housing crisis? It can find the money to redevelop the Kevin Street site, but residents in flat complexes right across Dublin, including in Pearse House and Markievicz House, are left in completely unacceptable conditions. The Government can allocate the funding to reconstruct the civic offices, but it cannot ensure that people, families and communities in the inner city have decent homes to live in. It is just not right. Ordinary workers are being driven out. A two-tier society is being created. We have the affluent down in Ringsend, over in Fenian Street or up in the new apartments in and around the south inner city while ordinary people cannot afford those properties. It is very frustrating to see the Government rushing this legislation through, ignoring the institutions its Members have been elected to and ramming through a Bill that will have a devastating impact on young people and old people. Senator Harmon mentioned this aspect. Older people are going to be hugely affected by it as well. I was contacted recently by a couple who had got a notice to quit. They are each in or around 61 or 62 years of age. They are not going to be able to rent one of these new apartments the big companies are building. Where are they going to end up then? They are going to end up using homeless services and it will be a result of the Government's neglect of ordinary people and middle-income workers. We hear about the middle class. Middle-class people are being squeezed out, too. Their kids are not going to be able to afford to pay €500,000 for a new house and they are not going to be able to afford to rent. We will get to a point where we have young people with decent jobs and relatively decent incomes of, say, €40,000 a year, who are working hard, doing everything right and paying their bills. They are not able to save enough to buy a house. They are struggling. They cannot have children because they cannot afford to do so. They have only one room. Where are they going to keep the second or third child? They do not have the room. The cost of childcare has gone through the roof as well. Where are people expected to find all of this money to pay for the costs and set up a family home? It is nearly impossible. If people are on middle-income wages, they will not have enough to pay rent in the high-rent rental areas. I know those and have documented them. They are also earning too much to go on the council housing lists. Where do they go then? They have to couch surf. They end up in family hubs. A person in recovery contacted me. This single individual cannot go home and had to move into a supported accommodation, but is being asked to leave that supported accommodation after eight months. Where does that person go now? There were 1,800 people ahead of him or her on the housing list. The person works and does all the right things but cannot afford to rent or buy a home or get a mortgage. It is depressing for young people. I would not like to be a young person trying to make my way in the world right now, because of the challenges. Like I said, setting up a family or even just trying to survive independent of your parents is becoming increasingly difficult. The new renters in new tenancies will be facing potential rent increases in the order of 20%, 25% or 30%. That is what their increase in rent will be over a year. In the case of Galway, it will be €5,000 and in the Minister of State's own constituency, I do not know if he has mentioned it to his constituents, but renters are going to pay roughly €3,500 extra per year in rent because of this Bill. Has the Minister of State told his constituents that? --- 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