Residential Tenancies (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2026: Committee Stage Seanad Éireann — 2026-02-18 ============================================================ Nessa Cosgrove (LAB), Labour Panel There is no doubt we all want to solve this crisis. Labour has a strong track record on housing. We had the housing Department while in government. We put forward proposals that were not always supported, but we also put forward proposals that were supported. We definitely do not want to disagree with this. We see there is, of course, room for a rental market, but we have put in 69 amendments and I cannot understand why none of them were taken up. We have a track record and a history. We have been calling for a State construction company since 2024, and I know other people have come along with it now too. We are not trying to be awkward. We in the Labour Party believe the market is not going to solve the housing crisis. This Bill is trying to appease institutional landlords. We can see this right across the board. A three-year rent freeze is nothing to be looking for. For general, smaller landlords, a three-year rent freeze is not the end of the world. Ruling out no-fault eviction is not going to be the end of the world and neither is stopping evicting children into homelessness. These are all very easy things on which the Government could work with a small landlord. It is the big institutional landlords who are the ones influencing this Bill. That is wrong and the Government should listen to the Opposition. We all live in the same constituencies. In Sligo where I live, the average rent has gone up 90% since Covid, with the average rent of a house being €1,400. That is crazy. In Leitrim, it is €1,300, having gone up 98% since Covid. If we wanted to have a full governmental approach to this, which I thought we would and that is one way we could look at solving the housing crisis, this would have been able to support bringing in the minimum wage for apprentices, which we have previously brought before the Seanad. We have a shortage of apprentices and there are many of them leaving in the first year, with low pay cited as one of the main reasons. I cannot understand why this was not taken into account. Instead of trying to appease smaller landlords, we are actually talking about vulture funds here. The Bill reflects the neoliberal influence that, unfortunately, this Government is paying homage to. My own party colleagues have brought forward legislation on the right to flexible work and the right to remote working. If you can do your job from home, you should be entitled to do it there. Again, this would relieve the housing crisis. I get the train up and down to Sligo. We can see the homeless crisis is very hard, and it took me a long time to get my head around it, seeing so many people, including children, homeless. As Labour Party spokesperson on workers' rights, I have made the point that there many low-paid workers are stuck in the middle. They cannot afford rent and, in my opinion, the HAP rates are too low. I know I should not be saying that because I do not want to be giving money to private landlords, but the HAP rates need to be increased until the supply of housing is there. The HAP rates are too low, so people are getting notices to quit and they have nowhere to go. The thresholds for social housing are also too low. To be eligible for a social house in Sligo, you have to earn €30,000. That is it. They should be higher. They have not been reviewed for years and should be higher until more housing comes on stream. If we look at building houses, why are there not more affordable to rent and affordable to buy houses being built? I argue this Bill aims to appease institutional landlords. Low pay is an area we have spoken about, and I know people here have spoken about pensions. Every day we are contacted on these issues. The main thing all of us as politicians hear about is housing, but there are also pensioners, as Senator Andrews said. I have pensioners coming to me who are 60 or 65 years of age and have received notices to quit but have nowhere to go. Where are they going to go? The issue of student accommodation has come up many times and there is a lack of available purpose-built student accommodation but. until it is built, and there are strides being made to build it, why can accommodation not be put into that in the meantime, so that students will not be affected by this? I am disappointed the Minister of State is not listening to the amendments. There are many qualified people with experience and knowledge on the Opposition benches. They are worthy of having their amendments listened to. Instead, the Bill will be rammed and pushed through the House. We spent hours deliberating over the Mental Health Bill and the defamation Bill, and rightly so; that is our job. We are here to talk through legislation and work it out; not to have it rammed through. I hope the Minister of State will reconsider the idea of bulldozing this through just because he does not want to listen to very sensible amendments from all the Opposition benches. --- 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