Residential Tenancies (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2026: Committee Stage Seanad Éireann — 2026-02-18 ============================================================ Joanne Collins (SF), Agricultural Panel I am always hearing stuff from the Government benches such as “time is more valuable than money” and, in this case, “it is all about supply”. There is no point in supply, however, if people are not able to afford that supply. With this Bill, supply only seems to play in favour of some parts of Dublin. Supply is not going to increase in Limerick, Cork, Kerry, Tipperary or any of the rural areas. Rather, it will hit those rural areas the hardest because they predominately have houses rather than apartments. In County Limerick, a new tenancy will be an extra €400 per month when market rates come in. In the Minister of State’s county of Cork, it will be an extra €300, while in Kerry it will be an extra €250. I am focusing on Munster at the moment. Most people in County Limerick cannot afford rent as it is, never mind an extra €400 per month for a new tenancy. It is absolutely crazy. Every week, I receive calls to my office from tenants facing eviction notices who ask what they should do and whether they will have to go to homeless services. Homeless services will get to a point - it is horrible to say it - where they will not be able to take these people. They are going to run out of space because people cannot afford to stay in rented accommodation. Most of these people do not even want to be in rented accommodation; they want to own their own homes. Going back ten, 20 or 30 years, the thing in this country was to get a good job and buy a house, but that is not even a possibility any more. To take a couple, one a teacher and the other a garda, as an example, people would have thought that, since they had such amazing jobs, they were on the pig’s back and would have no problem getting a house, having kids, putting them through college, buying the new car and going on holidays every year. That is not the case any more. These things cannot be done on those wages. People need to be earning over €100,000 to be able to even think about going to a mortgage company. Very few people can go to a mortgage company and get a mortgage. Maybe they could 20 years ago because house prices were on average between €200,000 and €250,000, and people could get one for a little bit cheaper if they were willing to downgrade. I am looking at houses being built in rural County Limerick in the west and a three-bedroom bungalow, off the plans, is €500,000. It is absolute madness to think about what the cost is going to be. No young person can afford that. I listened to other Senators talk about emigration. Young people are finishing school and college and getting out of here. This Bill is going to hit college students worse than it will hit rural Ireland. It is going to be bad for rural Ireland but it will be 100 times worse for college students because they take out a new lease every nine months. That is a new tenancy every nine months. It is going to be great for the people who own the houses because they will be able to keep increasing their rent every nine months. Where is the fairness for these students? They are breaking themselves every day to get to college. A lot of them have to commute. There are three colleges in Limerick city and the students in the county who cannot afford to drive but might be lucky enough to get accommodation in the city are now going to hit with this where they will pay huge, extortionate rents. I am sorry - it is not going to be them paying, but their parents. If they are in college Monday to Friday, they are only getting weekend jobs. They are not earning enough to pay for this rent. It is the parents who pay it, and they are being crippled left, right and centre. This is crazy. It is all for large corporate landlords and developers. This is not for the one-off landlord. Those large companies pay little to no tax. It is crazy to think that they can get away with upping the rent every single year for a new tenancy and not have to pay any penalty for it. I cannot understand it. It is as if the Government is punishing renters for the failure in housing. That is how it comes across. People who are renting are in that situation because they cannot afford to buy a house. Let us go back a few years. I built my first house when I was 20. I could not do that now if I were a 20-year-old. There would be no chance in hell I could do that now. I have two adult children at home. I have four children altogether but two of them are adults. I am never going to see the back of them. Do not get me wrong; I love them but I am going to get sick of living with them at some stage. The day one of them comes home and says they are going to have a child, that is it. I am sorry but there is not a chance. I am going to have to look at building chalets around my house or something because they are never moving out, and they know that. The only way they are ever going to move out is if they emigrate. I do not want that. While I wish for them to be able to live independently, I do not want to lose them. I know that when they emigrate, especially girls, they might meet someone over there and not come home because they end up having their families there. I have a lot of friends living in Australia and Canada who are never coming home. They have children and are married there. They are now residents of those countries and integrated into their societies. They might come home at Christmas to see their parents or if their parents become really sick, God forbid, they might have no choice but to come home. That is it, however. We have lost many good people, including many tradespeople. They trained as carpenters, builders, plumbers and electricians but we cannot even get one here if we have a problem in our house because none of them lives in the country anymore. This is what is going to happen if we keep pushing up the cost of rent. We are going to end up losing many more people. If Members think emigration is bad now, just give it a couple of months or years when this market reset keeps going. It will be 100 times worse. It will be all old people living here and no young people. When we are all retiring, there will be no one to take over and we are going to have the pension problem again. It goes around in a circle constantly. The Minister of State said he did not want to accept any of the amendments. Deputy Ó Broin has brought forward many brilliant ideas and I do not know whether it is stubbornness or pettiness that the Government parties do not want to look at them. He has consulted experts – not Sinn Féin experts, but independent experts - who back up some of the policies he has suggested, but the Government just does not want to look at them. It is just going to keep making the same mistakes over and over. The Minister of State asked about how we fix the housing crisis. There is one simple answer - we need to get rid of the parties that caused it. I do not mean for that to sound as bitchy as it does, but we need to get rid of the ones that caused the housing crisis. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have been in government for the past ten and 15 years, respectively. Jesus Christ, if we go back 15 years, people were able to live. People cannot live any more. It is absolutely heartbreaking to see that the next generation is going to come up and will not know what it was like to be able to go out for a drink, to not struggle to pay for their car tax or to be able to put diesel in the car and not worry. They are putting in €10 worth of diesel one day and waiting until the following day to put in another €10. They are seeing how they go by the end of the week. Fifteen years ago, we were able to live a little bit. This is not living. People are not living right now. They are struggling to survive every single day. The Bill, in allowing the upping of rent, is absolutely farcical. How can the Government say rents will go up so supply will come up so we can bring down the rent again? It is completely ridiculous. --- 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