Dublin City Flat Complex Retrofit and Regeneration: Motion [Private Members]
Dail Éireann — 2026-05-06
============================================================

Paul Murphy (PBP), Dublin South-West

The mistake can be righted at the next budget. There is a big campaign to ask people to reverse it. Ultimately, the vote was lost by one vote. There was an amendment to say we should not be increasing people's rents and should instead be hitting the big companies by introducing what is effectively a differential rates scheme. It can be reversed for next year. We need commitments from Labour and the Greens to do that, as opposed to charging people more.
I wish to speak for a moment about South Dublin County Council. In my constituency we do not have that many social housing flats.
Obviously, we have lots of social houses and the same sorts of issues apply. The biggest issue is people waiting for years and years for windows and doors that are necessary. There are gale-force winds passing through their houses. The idea of having insulation or whatever in that context is obviously a complete joke.
Just as in Dublin city, Fingal and Galway, the management in South Dublin County Council, with the presumed agreement of the ruling group, is planning to go for big rent increases. The council has produced a PowerPoint presentation to outline its case. Effectively, it is trying to suggest that just as in Dublin city, the council takes in less in rent than it spends in maintenance. It is not true. When you go through the figures, you see that it is not true whatsoever. The council is adding in all sorts of extra expenses - I will go into some of it for a second - to try to create that impression. Dublin City Council has said that it is not getting enough in rents so it has to increase them, and then it will improve maintenance. South Dublin County Council is raising a fair bit more in rents than it is actually spending in maintenance. It has no excuse for not providing it. I will give one example; the council includes in its expenditure the money that comes from central government for retrofitting, which is about €7 million a year. The council is including that in its own expenditure to try to pretend it is making less. The truth is that it is taking a lot more in rent than in maintenance. It does not need to increase the rents; there is no argument for it whatsoever.

---

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/2026-05-06/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:54+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-05-06