Residential Tenancies (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2026: Committee and Remaining Stages Dail Éireann — 2026-02-11 ============================================================ Paul Nicholas Gogarty (IND), Dublin Mid-West I wanted to get onto the housing committee. I am not a member of the committee but I welcome the opportunity to speak on this Bill again and support the amendments that were tabled, which relate to reviews, reports and caps. I have already said that I support the Bill in principle and the concept behind it but what is being proposed raises so many questions and concerns that, as others have mentioned, it is hugely unlikely to do what it is intended to, unless the intention is purely to increase supply and increase the profits of large developers and real estate investment trusts that are largely from outside the country. To give an example, I see the logic of providing exemptions for new builds linked solely to the consumer price index to try to get more construction going. I get the concept that the State needs to get other people building and more supply into the market. Eventually, that supply will, hopefully, stabilise prices or bring them down but there is a huge question over the market reset, as proposed here. There could have been a happy medium in which some form of an increase was provided but it was capped, rather than being entirely a so-called market increase, because, as others have said, housing should never be just left to the markets. It is about people's daily lives. I have a constituent who has fallen into arrears because it took them a long time to get a housing assistance payment. They are now asking if the local authority can give them homeless HAP because the landlord has indicated that they will take the homeless HAP if the council pays and the tenant they cannot pay the rent. The council is saying, however, that it is an existing tenancy, so the person, once they are evicted, will get the homeless HAP but they are now going to have to pay a much higher rent and the State is going to have to pay a much higher rent. The cost of HAP this year will be, I think, over €570 million. If that €570 million was used to build houses, we would get between 4,000 and 6,000 houses, which is not the number of houses needed. If you were trying to develop a system, you would not have brought in HAP in the first place, but we are kind of stuck with it now. That is the problem. As rents rise and people cannot afford to pay them, the taxpayer will essentially foot the bill. We have had various suggestions about housing, including that the State should become the single biggest developer. Successive governments have argued against that idea, saying it is not feasible, might breach the Stability and Growth Pact, etc. However, we need to look at the actual cost of housing delivery. We have not had a serious discussion about having a State real estate investment trust whereby people, through the credit union or some other means, would contribute towards the purchase or construction of housing. They would be stakeholders but it would be a social enterprise. There may be a return on the investment but it would be a lot less than the super-profits these companies are going to make. This approach would lead to affordable rents going forward because if it is left to the private market, the market will take its toll. I will digress slightly but the same principle applies. In Lucan, South Dublin County Council, in its wisdom, did not have its social enterprise company tender for the operation of the swimming pool. Instead, it was let out to a company called Aura Leisure, which is very successful and competent in its own field. However, there was no underlying subsidy. Now we have a public pool where people are paying commercial prices because it was left up to a commercial operator to manage it. In every situation where you bring in a cut, the developer or investor will take a much bigger cut than the Government or local authority would take in terms of the common good. I also refer to what others have said about the incentive to end tenancies sooner than would otherwise be the case. I think Deputy Boyd Barrett spoke about the situation in relation to an extra family member. --- 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