Rental Sector: Motion Seanad Éireann — 2026-05-27 ============================================================ Laura Harmon (LAB), Industrial and Commercial Panel The progress made is indefensible. It is crystal clear that the targets for house-building and social homes were not met last year. If it is so hard to be a landlord, why are one in five TDs landlords? Only eight Members of the Oireachtas are renting. There are 234 Members of the Oireachtas and only eight of them are renting, according to a survey in The Irish Times . The homeless figures are released every month. We know that the figures are much larger than what is reported in terms of hidden homelessness. More than 17,500 people are reported as homeless, 5,500 of whom are children. Poverty is skyrocketing in this country, which is supposed to be wealthy. Some 28% of children in this country are at risk of poverty when housing costs are taken into account. Rental property prices across Cork city, for example, were three times the national average at the end of March this year. Rental prices there are 64% higher than pre-Covid levels and 110% higher than their Celtic tiger peak. The cost of living and the cost of renting is crucifying people in this country. I do not believe that this Government cares about renters. It has thrown renters to the wolves. The average cost of renting a two-bedroom apartment in Cork city is now €2,126 per month. The fastest growing cohort of people falling into homelessness in this country is single people. It is impossible for them. People on single incomes are really struggling. They are struggling to get onto the property ladder. There is very little support for them when it comes to buying their own properties. More needs to be done to get people out of renting. There was a record number of eviction notices for rental properties in Ireland in the first three months of the year. We said this was going to happen. It was predictable and preventable. The Minister said he made a seismic intervention in the rental sector. What he has done is make more people homeless. That is an absolute fact. It is recorded. The Residential Tenancies Board received 7,062 notices of termination in the first quarter of this year, up 50% from the same period last year and the highest quarterly figure since these data series began in 2022. By what measure is the Government succeeding in protecting renters? The data does not lie. The landlord's intention to sell the property was listed as the reason for the termination in 60% of the cases. We need good landlords. Of course we need landlords in the market. I would argue that the Government opened the floodgates and let in the vulture funds. It has let in big investors and developers, who are buying up properties that people living in this country wish to buy. When we are trying to buy properties in this country, we are competing with big investors and developers. That is the position in which the Government has put the Irish people when it comes to trying to get on the property ladder. I have said this a million times before, but one of my biggest concerns at the minute, and it should be all of our concern, is that we cannot have a whole generation of people renting in the future when they are of pension age. People's pensions are already being eroded. There is already poverty in old age. What are we going to do when a whole generation of renting pensioners fall into homelessness? This is a ticking time bomb. It is already becoming a crisis in this country. We need to build at scale. The Labour Party is calling for an emergency three-year eviction ban. We need to end no-fault evictions. We need emergency protections for renters now. I would argue that we need a rent cap. A rent cap for student accommodation is vital. The Minister for further and higher education was before the House just the other day. We see colleges are bypassing the RPZ rules and increasing service charges to increase rents. There needs to be an intervention in that part of the market and more joined-up thinking between the Department of housing and other Departments, such as the Department of further and higher education. That needs to be addressed as part of this. The latest figures show a housing market that has been destroyed by Fianna Fáil's tried and tested policies, with rents increasing by more than 100% in the past decade and almost 50% since the Covid-19 pandemic. Those figures come before the devastating impact of the market reset mechanism is fully felt. That will allow landlords to reset rents to market rates between tenancies to bring about the return of double-digit rent increases and a return to economic evictions. One in four households entering homelessness in Dublin, for example, is coming directly from the private rental sector, driven by notices of termination and unaffordable rent. What would we in the Labour Party do differently? As I said, we would introduce a ban on no-fault evictions, increase the targets and meet the targets for social and affordable housing to at least 16,000 homes per year, overhaul second-hand acquisitions and the tenant in situ scheme to improve prevention, supply a State-led solution through a State construction company working with local authorities, and transform the Land Development Agency. Many of us in the Opposition have been proposing this for a long time now. There are solutions. I do not envy the Minister's task. Many of the issues were inherited by him but we absolutely need to address them. We need urgency around it because the country's future is at stake. --- 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/2026-05-27/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:55:00+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-05-27