Housing and Residential Tenancies (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2026: Committee and Remaining Stages Seanad Éireann — 2026-07-14 ============================================================ Alice-Mary Higgins (IND), National University of Ireland It is also an important question. If there is a deterioration from that situation, then that is also relevant. If it is the situation that persons can currently seek other emergency accommodation but, in the future, would not be allowed to, that is pretty significant. I have two questions, one I have already asked but will ask again. Why is this being done? Who is it for? Another related question is where are the people meant to go? There are two pieces here. The Government is deciding to bring forward legislation that says we are going to make it explicitly difficult or, in fact, impossible for a number of groups who do not have residency, such as migrant groups, returning migrants, who have been mentioned, and the wide range of people I and others have given, to get emergency accommodation, which we know is going to target a particular set of vulnerable people, and instead move them to not only a night-by-night arrangement, but a night-by-night with a kind of cruel thing where it is only two nights in a row. Why? What is the policy purpose of bringing that? Is it to reduce pressure on emergency housing accommodation? The Minister could choose to improve emergency housing accommodation. Is it to try to feed into a fight over the crumbs? Is the Minister saying that, as a State with the surplus we have, we only have so much emergency housing accommodation and we want to make people see that others are not getting it, as if that is going to make the people in emergency housing accommodation who are resident feel better? What is the purpose of that? What is the purpose of moving vulnerable people to a night-by-night system? Is it to punish them? Is it because the Minister wants to create that kind of competitive, performative cruelty we see happening in the United States, UK and parts of Europe, where they show they are going to give people a hard time so maybe they will not be there? Is that the goal? Is it to go with all of those many ridiculous measures brought in by Minister, Deputy O'Callaghan, and others, so we can act tough? Is it a look-hard measure? Is it chasing a vote to the right? I genuinely do not know what good policy purpose is served by this. All I can see is bad political narratives that are served by it. Incidentally, they will not come back and reward the party that brings them through. It will, in fact, contribute, as it has everywhere this has been done, to furthering this. Going back to the practical risks, the risks associated with these measures are more people, day by day, being visibly on the streets, without even the basic thing of emergency accommodation so they may have a place that is their anchor, where they can make decisions, build from, plan from and try to improve their situation from, more people wandering the streets in the daytime not knowing where or whether they will have accommodation that night. What does that do for public safety and well-being, particularly of those persons? There is greater risk that those people will fall out of the net altogether and end up homeless. Then we have more people homeless in the street and, again, many of them more likely to be from visible minorities and other vulnerable groups. These are really clear risks of what the Minister is proposing and I do not see what the benefit is. I would like the Minister to say what the justification and policy purpose is in doing this because I do not see good logic and I do see an amount of bad logic at play here. The consequences will be profoundly negative, not just for the individuals affected but for all of us as a society. I will be absolutely opposing this section and I would like an answer to that question. Another related question is, where are the people to go? What is the plan? The Minister creates a situation where people are not accessing emergency accommodation - in fact, the numbers for these are probably very small, comparatively, anyway - where they may be in the night-by-night accommodation and are out all day, or they are out totally, sleeping on the streets and homeless where they have fallen further out of the net provided for them. Where are people to go? Is the idea that we will refuse them emergency accommodation and these vulnerable people will evaporate? Will they all immediately leave? Is that the idea, that people will leave, because they are staying in Ireland because it is so great to be living in emergency accommodation? Because it is not. That is the question. The actual vulnerable people who are applying for and needing emergency accommodation do not disappear. They are still there. There are issues in that many people struggle to access emergency accommodation anyway, but, besides sending a big, performatively unwelcoming message, I do not see what this does for any purpose, whereas I do see what it does in terms of risk and compromising safety. --- 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/2026-07-14/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-27T06:52:15+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-07-14