Housing and Residential Tenancies (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2026: Committee and Remaining Stages
Seanad Éireann — 2026-07-14
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James Browne (FF), Wexford

One of the biggest problems is that while some local authorities are now making significant headway in the delivery of social housing and their waiting times for people to access social housing have fallen significantly, other local authorities are not stepping up to the mark. They are not making the same effort or using the available resources from the Department. We are now getting a significant variation in waiting times as well.
We need to get all local authorities to deliver social housing so that we get the waiting times somewhat equalised. There is a very real risk whereby local authorities with long waiting lists, with people waiting for long times, are neighbouring other local authorities with shorter waiting lists as a result of the effort of those local authorities. Somebody from one local authority area may move to another area and immediately move to the top of the list, to the detriment of people in that local authority's area.
There are practical problems there. In an ideal world, everybody's waiting times in various local authorities would be very similar, this would not be an issue and passporting could be implemented. I have no difficulty with the theory of it but there are some very real practical problems with it at the moment.

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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