Residential Tenancies (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2026: Committee Stage (Resumed) and Remaining Stages Seanad Éireann — 2026-02-19 ============================================================ Patricia Stephenson (SD), Labour Panel Thank you, Senator. We are reaching eviction rates not seen in Ireland since the 1850s. How evocative and how horrifying. This is from an article by RTÉ, so if our national broadcaster is presenting misleading information we can take that up with it. It is from something we would call a trusted news source. This Bill is going to see more evictions. The Minister will talk about the six-year tenancy but I have mentioned before I have sat in this Chamber for hours of debate to discuss this legislation because I care about the impact it is going to have on people. We have major concerns that we are going to see a tsunami of evictions coming from this. We have major concerns about it and reading this article about a level of evictions that has not been seen since the Famine is horrifying and should send shivers down our spines. The article is, as I said, from RTÉ. I am just reading an article from our national broadcaster. --- 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