Housing and Residential Tenancies (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2026: Committee and Remaining Stages
Seanad Éireann — 2026-07-14
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Conor Murphy (SF), Industrial and Commercial Panel

I move amendment No. 16:
In page 16, after line 39, to insert the following:
“(i) the household or members of the household were refused access to emergency homeless accommodation provided under Section 10 of the Housing Act 1988”.
I will speak to amendment Nos. 16 and 17. The overall aim of this Bill, as has been asserted by the Minister, is to take the current eligibility criteria for social housing and put them on a statutory footing, creating a new appeals mechanism for those refused access to social housing. We are not against this Bill in principle. However, a mess has been made of it with regard to the legislation and on that basis, we cannot support it.
The Bill does not adequately address challenges facing returning migrants. The appeals mechanism is not independent. Given the complex legal issues the appeals would involve, such as the interaction of legal residency, habitual residency and social housing support, it would have been better to have one single, independent appeals office located within the Housing Agency, similar to how social welfare operates.
The Minister also introduced significant changes to the Housing Act 1988 relating to homelessness on Report Stage with virtually no scrutiny. As others have said, homelessness NGOs and human rights organisations have expressed serious concerns with regard to these last-minute changes, saying they could lead to an increase in rough sleeping. We are also concerned that while people may have an entitlement to emergency accommodation, they could be wrongly denied access to it and will not be afforded the right to an appeal.
The purpose of amendments Nos. 16 and 17 is to extend the right to appeal to people denied emergency accommodation. As I said, there are some parts of this Bill that we are able to support but, overall, we cannot support the Bill in front of us.

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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