Housing Schemes
Dail Éireann — 2026-03-05
============================================================

Eoin Ó Broin (SF), Dublin Mid-West

The Minister's response is genuinely remarkable. He does not even accept there is a problem despite the fact that the data from the AHBs and the LDA confirms it. What is worse, LDA tenants are effectively paying corporation tax as part of the rent. That amounts to 15% of the rent they pay. Although the LDA has been given an exemption from corporation tax for new developments, that will not be passed on as an affordability measure, as per the Government. Worse, the LDA has just hit almost 500 of its tenants with rent increases that are entirely unjustified and those increases will range between 2% and 5%. This is at a time when rents should be coming down.
I will give the Minister a third opportunity to respond. There is a growing number of people who earn too much to qualify for social housing and not enough to qualify for cost rental. Does he accept this is a policy problem his Department needs to examine? Does he accept, for example, that solutions such as passing on the corporation tax reduction and discouraging cost-rental landlords from increasing the rent would assist in tackling the genuine affordability problem for thousands of working people?

---

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/dail/2026-03-05/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:44+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-03-05