Residential Tenancies (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2026: Committee and Remaining Stages Dail Éireann — 2026-02-11 ============================================================ Conor Sheehan (LAB), Limerick City This Bill is a mirage because of what the Minister is talking about regarding security of tenure. There are things in the Bill about security of tenure that I would welcome were they in isolation, but we have a situation where the Government has a policy outcome whereby it has drafted a Bill that is so complicated and convoluted. It has made a policy decision that is essentially pulling in two separate directions. It claims it is trying to offer renters improved security of tenure but it is allowing landlords to reset the rent in between tenancies, which all but wipes that out. I will speak to amendments Nos. 7 and 8 in my name. I will also speak in support of amendment No. 2. My colleagues and I have all asked the Minister what modelling or analysis the Government has done in relation to this Bill. He comes back constantly and talks about the Housing Agency review into rent pressure zones. That review does not provide a predictable analysis as to what the effects of this Bill will be, which have been set out very well by the Deputies who spoke. I look at my city of Limerick, which the Minister of State and I both represent. We have had the highest level of rent increases in the entire country. I look at the supply issues we have and at what the Minister says about this Bill apparently incentivising supply, but the supply this Bill will incentivise, if it incentivises any, will be expensive, high-end, build-to-rent apartments. Such apartments do not get built in Limerick. With the market reset mechanism, the average length of a tenancy being three to three and half years, and the deficit we have in student specific accommodation in Limerick, I am concerned in respect of the city I represent that renters in Limerick will be on the hook for rent increases of at least 20%. I look back to the residential tenancies amendment Act the then Minister, Simon Coveney, introduced in 2016, which introduced the RPZ regime and the 4%. Flawed and all as that mechanism is and was, at the very least, when then Deputy Coveney introduced that legislation, modelling was done. Modelling was done that was targeted at areas with the highest and fastest rising rents. With this Bill, the Minister has not done anything to look at rent predictability. Not one witness who came before the Oireachtas joint committee on housing said this Bill would result in rents not rising any more or rents falling, and rents need to fall. They cannot rise any more. Renters cannot pay any more and every witness who came in told us clearly that this Bill will open tenants - tens of thousands of them - to absolutely extortionate rent increases. As my colleague Deputy Boyd Barrett pointed out earlier, there is a huge issue with HAP. The HAP limits, plus the homeless HAP and the discretionary HAP top-ups, do not go anywhere near what rents actually cost at the moment. With this Bill there will be a real return to economic evictions. People will be evicted because they cannot pay the rent. The truth behind this legislation is that it is for large institutional investors and big property developers. It is not for smaller SME builders. It is certainly not for renters. The Government constantly talks about balance. I find that term offensive in relation to this Bill because the balance is being struck against renters who cannot afford to pay what they are paying. As true as night follows day, the original Residential Tenancies Act that was introduced in 2004 has been amended 14 times. That means every 18 months on average the Residential Tenancies Act gets amended. I guarantee that the Minister or another Minister will be back because rents will rise to a level that the Minister and the Government will not be able to sustain. I have tabled amendment No. 7, the purpose of which is to require the Minister and the Government to conduct a review of the operation and effectiveness of all amendments made by this Bill to the Residential Tenancies Act to include findings and conclusions and that the review be laid before the Oireachtas. The Minister constantly talks about the need to incentivise supply, but we have not had any clarity about what this Bill will do, bar our analysis of what it will do to rent levels. There is no certainty that it will deliver anything like the level of supply needed to arrest the upward trend in rents. Rents have gone up by the bones of 100% in Dublin, for example, in over a decade and they will go up and up again. I simply do not believe this Bill will work. The Minister has not laid the evidence before us to show how this Bill will work. There needs to be a statutory duty on the Minister to examine what he has done, what the effects are and to come back to the House. Amendment No. 8 is similar. It is to insert a new section 3, with the heading "Impact forecast". It requires the Minister, within not more than six months after the Bill is passed, to publish a statement of the forecast of the impact of the Bill on market rents for the following years. The reason the Government has not done any modelling like this is that it knows that fundamentally what we are saying about rent levels, what we have calculated from looking at the RTB data, is what will transpire, if it is not worse, certainly in the short term. In this amendment, I am looking for the forecast to relate to a representative sample of tenancies. The general public, and most important the tens of thousands of renters who are terrified of the effects of this Bill, are entitled to know what the impact of these proposals will be, how much extra rent they will be forced to pay. It is beyond irresponsible to push a Bill like this through in less than 12 hours if the Minister cannot make such a forecast and if he does not and cannot model what the Bill will do, how it will affect rent levels in the coming decade, how much renters will pay and what the outcome of the Bill will be in terms of this so-called supply. We have asked questions like this nearly half a dozen times since the general scheme was published and I constantly get the same answer. What will we see with this Bill? For example, there will be new categories of landlord. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael backbenchers will come here tonight and they will not have the foggiest notion of what they are voting on because this Bill is so confusing and convoluted. For example, the restrictions for larger landlords should be applied universally because the tenants of larger landlords are usually tenants in build to rent properties, properties owned by institutional investors. Their rent is already unbelievably expensive and these properties are rarely, if ever, sold. For the tenants of the new so-called smaller landlords, not much effectively changes and the fact is that people should not be condemned to rent increases of 20% and possibly 30%. We will have a situation of the average length of a tenancy being between three and three and a half years, when it is ordinary working people, people on low incomes, who will have to, in some cases, pay 40%, 50% or 60% of their hard earned income on rent. This will absolutely crush them and the Minister has not set out at all empirically what this Bill will do to rents in the private rental sector. As I said earlier, more of this was done when Simon Coveney introduced the Bill at the end of 2016 which introduced RPZs. --- 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