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 I move amendment No. 10: In page 10, to delete line 20. We are again coming to the issue of being habitually resident. Amendments Nos. 10 and 11 delete the definitions of habitually resident and lawfully resident that would be inserted into the Housing (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act as a consequence of section 12 of the Bill. Section 12 inserts residency requirements for social housing support. We do not believe this section is necessary. It would be useful if the Minister would provide the reasoning for the inclusion of this section. When we discussed emergency accommodation, the Minister referred to the requirement that people are resident in the State and are planning to make their lives in the State. We do not know what anybody is planning. We do not know the hopes and dreams that people may have and what they are planning to do. It should not be the case that to get emergency accommodation you have to be planning to live in the State in the long term. Emergency accommodation is a safety measure. It is a proper public good and a safety measure. It is not solely emergency accommodation as a stepping stone into social housing. Emergency accommodation is about having proper, good quality emergency homeless supports for persons who find themselves, for a variety of reasons and in a variety of situations, homeless. It is about ensuring that they are accessing proper supports and facilities in proper situations. This is nothing other than the downgrading of the already precarious situation of emergency housing support to the incredibly precarious situation of day-by-day accommodation. Habitual residency should not be relevant. It is about having proper standards and measures, unless the Government wishes to send a deeply intense message that Ireland is not a place of welcomes. Many people, including those here on student visas, fall into this space and may find themselves vulnerable and having to access emergency housing supports. The idea is that someone should be planning to live his or her life here. The habitual residency condition does not focus on whether people are planning to build their lives here. That is not a core or main part. There is a line about a "centre of interest" and reference to future intentions. We cannot know someone's intentions. This is a very strange bar to be putting to persons making decisions about emergency housing provision. We are talking about people who might be accessing support for a few days, a week, two weeks or a month. We will have to make habitual residency determinations before we decide if we are going to support somebody who is presenting with emergency housing needs. That, in itself, is bureaucratic. Those measures should not be the bar for something. There are questions and issues about how they come in. Where the measures do come in, however, is in relation to social housing. They already applied. I would like the Minister to provide the reasoning. The residency requirement for homelessness supports will have a clear impact on vulnerable people, such as asylum seekers and people on short-term visas and working student visas. The impact of the residency requirement for the provision of social housing is quite unclear. It was already largely the case in application. It is not a matter where we believe there is a need for the provision. I will flag my concerns about that provision as it applies to every member of a household. I worry that there may be unforeseen consequences. If one member of a household is not habitually resident, even if all other members of the household are habitually resident, a vulnerability could be created. We may then have situations whereby households may be entitled to look for social housing but an individual member of that household who is not habitually resident is not able to access social housing with that family or able to access emergency housing support but is instead in a kind of day-by-day limbo. Perhaps the Minister would clarify what would happen in those circumstances. As I said, the provision in respect of emergency housing supports is cruel and dangerous. The provision here around social housing is unclear and unnecessary. --- 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