Residential Tenancies (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2026: Committee Stage (Resumed) and Remaining Stages Seanad Éireann — 2026-02-19 ============================================================ Nessa Cosgrove (LAB), Labour Panel I move amendment No. 7: “Notices of termination: temporary ban 3. Notwithstanding any other provision of this Act or any other enactment or rule of law, the period of 3 years commencing on the passing of this Act is deemed to be an emergency period within the meaning and for the purposes of section 5 of the Emergency Measures in the Public Interest (Covid-19) Act 2020 and that section, with the exception of subsection (6)(b), applies accordingly.”. I welcome the Minister back to the House. It looks like I have the final amendment of the day. It is a not a very far-fetched amendment and it is a good one. It would basically insert a three-year eviction ban. Small landlords and reasonable landlords might be willing to do this. It is the big institutional landlords that probably would not be in favour of introducing this ban. The section would, in effect, reintroduce the emergency period Members will remember from Covid-19. The emergency measure was provided for in the Emergency Measures in the Public Interest (Covid-19) Act and during that period there was a statutory pause on all termination notices. We are calling for this pause until there are more houses built. It is very reasonable. We have another amendment later, which unfortunately we are not going to be able to get to, calling for a ban on evictions into homelessness to stop the evicting of children. As this is being guillotined we are not going to get a chance to speak about it. If the Minister accepts this amendment the new section would provide for a similar ban for three years on all termination notices and evictions. That is pretty reasonable. There are 69 amendments and none of them have been accepted. It would be very fitting for the Minister to accept this one. --- 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/2026-02-19/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:39+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-02-19