Housing and Residential Tenancies (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2026: Second Stage Seanad Éireann — 2026-07-09 ============================================================ Patricia Stephenson (SD), Labour Panel No one is disputing that states - any state or this State - can establish criteria for social housing but I think it is important that when we are legislating in an area that directly affects the right to adequate housing, we have a duty to ensure that those criteria are fair, proportionate and fully consistent with human rights and equality obligations. Housing is more than bricks and mortar. It is about safety and dignity. It is about whether a child has somewhere to sleep, whether a woman escaping abuse can rebuild her life or whether a person with a disability has the stability everyone deserves. This is why the legislation before us really needs careful scrutiny. The Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission, IHREC, has warned that this Bill risks excluding some of the most vulnerable people in our society from accessing social housing support, including victims and survivors of domestic and gender-based violence, people who have experienced trafficking and members of the migrant community. These concerns have been echoed by the Free Legal Advice Centres, FLAC, the Irish Refugee Council and many others working day to day with people who already face significant barriers in finding a safe and secure home. They are not asking for special treatment; they are asking to ensure that the law does not create new barriers for people who are already incredibly vulnerable. Every good legislation should recognise the human story behind it that it is trying to fix. That might include violence and hardships. When we have a legal test on paper, it might look straightforward but it can have really profound consequences in a person's life if it is applied without sufficient safeguards. Is the Minister confident that this legislation meets our duty and obligations under our IHREC legislation? Dublin Simon Community has said that access to emergency accommodation should always be led by need and not by entitlement. We should not place ourselves in a position where people who are lawfully living in communities, contributing to our society and trying to rebuild lives are left without the possibility of securing a home because our legislation fails to reflect the realities they face. The habitual residence requirement might appear straightforward but the lived reality is often anything but that. Laws that appear neutral on the face of it can have very different effects for different groups of people on the ground. Was an equality and human rights impact assessment carried out before the provisions were drafted? The Minister might answer that specifically. How was the impact on people experiencing multiple and overlapping forms of disadvantage assessed within that as well? Inequality is rarely experienced through one single characteristic. It tends to be very intersectional. The public sector equality and human rights duty, which I am sure the Minister is very familiar with, demands that public bodies do not simply treat everyone the same but that they consider whether apparently neutral policies might have unequal impacts on different groups of people. That is what we are trying to get to the nub of here today. If this Bill is to place social housing and emergency accommodation eligibility on a statutory footing, then we should be satisfied that it is designed with equality and human rights at its core. I am currently not satisfied that has happened but the Minister can tell us what assessments have taken place. We should know that the impacts have been assessed and that unintended consequences have been properly considered because we risk having legislation that is going to create additional barriers when our housing system is surely there to protect 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/seanad/2026-07-09/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:55:11+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-07-09