Residential Tenancies (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2026: Committee and Remaining Stages Dail Éireann — 2026-02-11 ============================================================ Paul Murphy (PBP), Dublin South-West This Bill should be called the raise the rent Bill. The purpose of the Bill is to raise people's rents. That is literally it. The Government likes to pretend that there is some greater, deeper meaning going on. It likes to talk about security of tenure but the purpose of this Bill is to raise people's rents. People's rents have already almost doubled in the past ten years but the Government thinks that for the people it represents - the big landlords, the so-called institutional investors - the rents are not rising fast enough so it is going to introduce this Bill to raise the rents even faster to cost the average renter more than €3,000 extra a year. That is the purpose of this Bill and it will be the consequence of this Bill. The Government is going to ram this Bill through. It will guillotine it and shut down the debate in this House tonight and the consequences are that people's rents are going to rise. What does that look like? It is a massive further transfer of wealth from some of the poorest people in the country to some of the richest people and richest corporations in the country, which are already making plenty of money from their very many rental properties. That is one impact. Another impact is that evictions are going to soar and not from a low point but from a high point. Evictions are already at the same level proportionately as they were in the 1850s in Ireland. Do we know what came after that number of evictions in Ireland in the 1850s? What came after that was the Land War because people simply had enough and I think that is going to come now for the Government as well. People may say that this does not make any sense. The Government has not presented any evidence to show what is going to happen and how this is magically going to translate into supply. All the experts are saying this is not working. The Government talks day in, day out about listening to hard-working people and trying to look out for renters, so why on earth is it bringing in a Bill that is going to rapidly increase people's rents? The answer is very simple. If it walks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, it is probably a duck. It is a landlords' Government. That is the bottom-line truth of it. We have a Government that is interested in representing the views and the material interests of big landlords. About one third of Government Deputies are landlords but the rest of them represent them very effectively in any case because ideologically they are committed to this idea that the market has to solve things and trickle-down economics. The Government for the past ten years has been implementing all the policies that are supposedly great and will resolve the housing crisis but that have resulted in the housing crisis getting worse, but by a happy coincidence, there is a big transfer of wealth from the public, through the State and taxpayers' money, to landlords and from renters to landlords. That is the essence of it. We have a landlords' Government that represents the interests of the tiny minority that are landlords and the even smaller minority that are big landlords in this country as opposed to all of those who are affected by the housing crisis. The fundamental point is that the Government does not represent those who suffer from the housing crisis but those who profit from the housing crisis. Why does the Government keep introducing policies that make the housing crisis worse? It is time to draw the conclusion that it does not care about ending the housing crisis. If the housing crisis ended, the Government's friends - the developers and the big landlords - would not be able to make the sort of money they are currently able to make. That is the fundamental point and it is why we need to get rid of this Government as soon as we can and build a movement on the streets and in communities to resist these rent increases and the evictions that are going to flow from it and to massively apply pressure on the Government on these issues. I want to raise a point about landlords in this Dáil. It is shocking that about 20% of TDs in the Dáil are going to vote tonight on legislation that is personally going to benefit them. If you are a landlord and you vote in the Dáil tonight to pass this legislation, you are going to personally benefit, on average, to the tune of about €3,000. It is shocking that it is allowed in the first place, and, whether they agree with it or not, that the TDs affected would not put their hands up and say that they are personally affected by this and recuse themselves from the vote. Even at this late stage, I appeal to landlord TDs not to participate in this vote tonight. It is utterly wrong that landlords, who will personally benefit from the increasing of rents, are going to get to vote on this legislation. They will personally benefit from it while it will have such a devastating effect on so many people. In general, we have a landlords' Government with plenty of landlord TDs, but it is a bit much that literally the landlords' lobbying organisation wrote amendments for TDs and the TDs literally copy and pasted them and submitted them. This is the democratic process. Independent Ireland's Gillian O'Toole literally got the same email that the rest of us got from the Irish Property Owners Association, IPOA, the landlords' lobby organisation, that asked us to put in these amendments on behalf of landlords. Independent Ireland said: "Yes, sir. We represent the landlords. We will submit the amendments." It is very blatant. Do not let anyone fall for the idea that Independent Ireland represents the common man or woman; it does no such thing. It explicitly represents the landlords. The landlord lobby group says that it wants these amendments and Independent Ireland says, "Yes, sure. We will put them in immediately." People should be aware of that. I want to raise a particular point about the impact of this in terms of HAP. The point has been made about the HAP levels. The other point in relation to that is many HAP tenants across the country will effectively have a double rent increase. Councils across the country are hiking council rents. Dublin City Council, for example, has voted to do so and is due to implement the hike from April. Galway City Council has done it and other councils across the country have done it too. It looks like South Dublin County is trying to go for significant increases. It is to be voted on towards the end of this year to come into effect next year. This is a nationwide process. It is being driven by council management, but it is also being driven by the Government. Reading the Government's latest housing plan, it explicitly talks about merging council rents and cost rental over time, in other words, doing away with the differential rent system and the basic and fair idea that the amount people pay for housing should be based on their income. It is bad enough that it is going to result in massive increases for council tenants, but HAP tenants are going to be doubly hit. HAP tenants are going to be faced with significant increases - let us say, 30% increases in what they are paying to the council - and then they are going to be hit by this increase which, if the HAP limits do not increase, all of which will be gobbled up in the top-ups that they are paying. They are the worst affected and they are some of the most vulnerable people in the housing market as a whole. The Opposition is mostly united in this House - the left Opposition, certainly - in opposing what the Government is doing here, but I call on all the left parties to take a stand on the councils against these council rent increases. Even if they have voted in some cases to allow these to go ahead, they should reconsider it, particularly in light of what is happening here and the extra pressure that it is going to apply in terms of HAP tenants. What our amendment seeks to do is show an image of how you could do things fundamentally differently. If you start from the point of view of not representing landlords but, instead, of representing the majority of people who are affected by the housing crisis, you would go about this in a very different way by establishing a board to reset rents to affordable levels and where the guideline for establishing affordability would be rents that are, in general, no more than 20% of a tenant's income. That is the alternative way to tackle the housing crisis. It says let us stop pouring public money into the pockets of private landlords and developers. Let us stop pouring and enabling more and more private renters' money to be funnelled into the hands of landlords. Instead, let us protect tenants. Let us ban economic evictions. Let us control rents and use public money to have a State construction company to build social and affordable homes. That is the sensible thing to do, if you were not governed by the class interest of representing landlords and the free market ideology that goes alongside that. --- 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