Student Accommodation
Dail Éireann — 2026-05-12
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James Lawless (FF), Kildare North

I have indeed sat down with the Minister for housing. We had a number of good interactions over the past year, and particularly when he announced his intention to bring forward the reform of the rent pressure zones and to legislate for that. We immediately engaged on that and we spent a long time working out the details of how that would affect students. One of the outputs of that is the special protection regulation for students specifically stating that student-specific accommodation is safe from the regular rent reset that can happen in other private accommodation when a tenant vacates. Where there is a student apartment, regardless how many students come and go, the rent cannot be reset for a minimum of at least three years. This is a very specific protection measure to save students from the annual reset. We know the way students operate and how they come and go with each academic year. This is in law. It passed through these Houses and is now enshrined in the rental acts, and rightly so.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-05-12/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-27T06:54:49+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-05-12