Residential Tenancies (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2026: Committee and Remaining Stages
Dail Éireann — 2026-02-11
============================================================

Richard Boyd Barrett (PBP), Dún Laoghaire

I move amendment No. 2:
In page 5, between lines 29 and 30, to insert the following:
"(2) Within three months of the coming into operation of this act the Minister shall produce a report into the affordability of current rents and establish a board to reset rents to affordable levels, where the guideline for establishing affordability will be rents that are, in general, no more than 20 per cent of a tenant’s income.
(3) Within three months of the coming into operation of this act the Minister shall produce a report into the establishing of a principle that the rights of a tenant shall not be affected by the size or type of the landlord and/or the date of the tenancy commencement.
(4) Within three months of the coming into operation of this act the Minister shall produce a report aimed at establishing the principle of preventing "no fault" evictions.".
The best place to be to respond to the Government's Bill probably is with the protestors assembling outside Leinster House. The Bill will make an already dire housing crisis even worse by allowing landlords charging extortionate rents that are unaffordable for huge numbers of people to reset those rents to even higher levels. It beggars belief that the Government is doing this unless one remembers that it is not really representing the interests of the people affected by the crisis but, rather, is representing the interests of those profiteering on the backs of the housing misery of others. There can be no other explanation for what the Government is doing with this Bill.
My amendment No. 1 sought, in essence, to stop the Bill until the Government had looked at what its impact would be on the affordability of rents, had addressed the issue of no-fault evictions and had a plan to make rents affordable. In the absence of that amendment, which was ruled out of order, amendment No. 2 seeks to force the Government to do those things in the aftermath of passing the Bill. Of course, I do not believe the Government is in any way serious about addressing those issues, whether before, during or after the Bill is passed, because if it were, it would not have introduced the Bill in the first place.
However, for the sake of form, let us rehearse the Government's argument. It is like the argument made by the US military during the Vietnam War that it needed to bomb villages to save them. The Government is saying that to reduce rents, it must increase them. It is perverse Orwellian logic. Rents must be allowed to be reset to even more unaffordable levels because somehow, by magic, that will make them go down at some point in the future. There is no evidence, ever or anywhere, of that happening. This is market dogma of the absolutely worst kind. The reason the Government is not bothered that it makes no sense whatsoever is that, in fact, the Bill will do what the Government really wants it to do, which is to further enrich property speculators, investors and corporate landlords.
My view is that Members of the Dáil who are landlords should recuse themselves from this debate and should not vote on the Bill. It is absolutely unconscionable that we have a proposal that will jack up already unaffordable rents to even more unaffordable levels and that people in here who vote for it might benefit financially from it. That is outrageous. There is a disproportionate number of landlords among the Members from the Government parties of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael and among some of the Independent Members backing up the Government. The number is disproportionate in the context of the political parties in the Dáil and in terms of broader representation in society.
Beyond the question of people financially benefiting, we have a Government that believes the nonsense that somehow property investors will solve the housing crisis. I kind of cannot believe it. The reason we have a housing crisis is because the entire housing sector was handed over by the State to property investors after the crisis of 2008 to 2009. Cherrywood, in my area, as the biggest residential development in the entire country and one of the biggest in Europe, offers a pretty good test case of housing policy. At the point when that development was taken over by the National Asset Management Agency, NAMA, and thereby nationalised and brought into public ownership, it could have been developed by the State to deliver social and affordable housing. Instead, Governments led by Fine Gael and subsequently Fianna Fáil decided to hand it to property investors.
The consequence of this was that for quite a few years, those investors sat on the development because it was more profitable to do that than to build houses. We were actively seeking at the time for those houses to be built. We were not objecting; we were asking that they be built. However, the investors sat and waited for the value of those properties to go up and the housing crisis to get worse. Then they started to flip them to other property developers. Mel Reynolds said to me at the time that Hines probably made a profit on Cherrywood before a single brick was laid. It made profit from speculating on zoned land.
What prices are being charged for the houses and apartments Hines eventually started to build there? The houses are going for €600,000 and €700,000, which is unaffordable for the vast majority of people. The rents being charged are €2,000, €2,500, €3,000 and €3,500 a month, which are likewise unaffordable for the vast majority of people. These homes will end up being owned by big property investment funds, large international pension funds and so on, which will charge these extortionate rents. Now the Government wants a reset in order that even higher rents can be charged. By the way, the developer does not want to build the town centre that is needed by the community because it cannot make as much profit out of doing so. That is where this stuff leads. The Government thinks these people will reduce rents as a consequence of allowing them to reset those rents upwards. It is absolute nonsense. This Government measure will increase investor profits, make rents even more unaffordable and lead to increased speculation. It will do nothing to reduce rents. In fact, it will do worse than nothing in that it will exacerbate the housing crisis.
All of this extraordinary action is supposedly justified on the basis there will be some greater protection and security for tenants by way of the six-year rule. The problem with that is if rents are unaffordable and if people can still be evicted for not being able to pay the rent, which will be allowed to happen, then the likelihood of not being able to pay an unaffordable rent and therefore getting evicted is a lot higher. Some 60,000 to 70,000 tenancies end on a voluntary basis or just end.
That means almost all tenancies - 60,000 to 70,000 a year - will end over a period of about a decade. That means all rents very quickly will be unaffordable. In Dublin, the average rent is €2,100 and they will all go up to the level of what is advertised on daft.ie . If we go on daft.ie and look for something now, they are €2,500, €3,000 and €3,500. All rents will be up to that level. There will be dramatic increases and that will happen all over the country, exacerbating the housing crisis and driving more people into homelessness because there is literally nowhere for them to go that is affordable. That is what is going to happen.
I will mention a couple of other consequences of all of this. People who are on HAP will potentially get a double hit on all of this. Many of the people who are on HAP are paying top-up payments to the private landlord, and the HAP levels, inadequate as they are, are not adjusted for rent increases. Therefore, if your landlord increases the rent and you are on HAP, the top-up you have to pay is even more. Huge numbers of people are in serious trouble due to the top-ups they are having to pay because they are also paying a council-based rent and council rents are now going up as well. There is a change in Dublin city. They are moving now to increase rents in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown. It is being done in different ways in different places, but across the country local authority rents are going up as well. Some of the most vulnerable people will get a double hit because of what the Government is doing, driving even more people into homelessness and crisis situations.
On the protection of tenancy thing, there is a loophole I guarantee will be exploited by the landlords now for those tenants where there is a little bit of nominally greater protection because of the six-year thing, though it is also possible now. That loophole comes into play if the house, the residence, is not suitable to the person's need. Do you know that means? It means a tenant can get evicted for their rental property being overcrowded. If a person with no kids then has a child, or a person has another child, the residence is now not suitable to their needs because they need a bigger place. A landlord can say, "Sorry, I am evicting you because there are more people in the house than there was when I signed the lease to put you in." That will be allowed for under the legislation. They will find ways to do that.
Do these corporate landlords do that kind of thing? Oh they absolutely do. I have the living proof in a multi-unit development called St. Helen's Court which is across the road from my constituency office in Dún Laoghaire. I do not know how many times I have raised it. Eight or nine years later, the majority of the units, all of them perfect units, are sitting there empty since it was taken over by a vulture fund and then another vulture fund which tried to mass-evict the tenants. It eventually drove them out. We successfully resisted some of the attempts to evict people but eventually, with the grind of being threatened constantly with eviction and having to go to the RTB, people just left. Some of the people did get housed by the council. The majority of those properties continue to sit there empty because it suits the vulture fund for them to be empty in order that it can get beyond the existing legislation's restrictions on rent increases, eventually jack up the rents again and get around the existing RPZs. That is what they do. The landlords play the long game. They inflict misery on the tenants. They try to evict people, eventually drive them out and sit on the properties, in this case for nearly a decade. It is perfectly empty when there are people homeless on the street outside. They do this because it is profitable to do it and the Government allows that. It is absolutely shocking and now the Government is going to facilitate even further that sort of profiteering.
There is a lot more to be said and I am sure my colleagues here will be saying many of those things but this is a disgrace. The best place for people who are worried about the housing crisis to be is out protesting. I hope we see more protests against this because the Government has really revealed its true colours on this one and we need to fight back. People who want something done about this housing crisis and who want to get affordable rents, secure and affordable housing and to protect tenants' rights need to begin to get organised on the streets.

---

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/dail/2026-02-11/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-09-14T01:01:02+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-02-11