Residential Tenancies (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2026: Committee and Remaining Stages
Dail Éireann — 2026-02-11
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Paul Nicholas Gogarty (IND), Dublin Mid-West

There is no absolute clarity on whether a house would be deemed unsuitable because there might be, say, an extra child or a boy and girl and then all of a sudden there is overcrowding. The landlord can tick a box and they have an excuse to get them out and then look at ways they can increase their income. Those types of unknowns are very worrying. The one I mentioned on Second Stage was the mindset of landlords trying to find a way. They might think, “Sure I have a family member. We’ll try to get them into the house for a couple of months and that will cover the family need.” I also raised the issue, which was not answered, around enforcement. How do we know the properties are meeting the family need criteria? How many extra people will be employed to investigate it, for example? I have already mentioned that the Residential Tenancies Board is massively underfunded. It is 18 months since I submitted a case about a very dodgy landlord who has multiple properties, is in breach of multiple planning regulations and is not registered with the RTB, and there has been no comeback. I am sure that situation is multiplied throughout my constituency and everyone else's as well. We do not have those checks and balances.
We have what in a sense is an attempt by the Government to do something visionary and be seen to tackle the crisis. It sets a new market rate and there is the 2% cap going forward. It looks very good in principle. However, let us take the smaller landlords, for example. I am thinking of a person who owns one property. There may be a number of TDs with one property although I know there are TDs with multiple properties where it is a business. I have been dealing with a lot of these types of landlords. From talking to people, the smaller landlord is the one who wants someone to mind the property for them. They often treat the second property as their own because they have inherited it or it is an investment so that when they are in retirement age they have a steady income. They might let a company manage it and they get a percentage of it. They would prefer to have a lower rent but with very steady tenants because, as well as the nightmare, greedy, obnoxious, unrelenting landlords, you also have a minority of tenants who are nightmare tenants. The small landlord wants an easy life and they are the type of people we should be encouraging to stay in the market and not the massive investors who are treating it as an income stream. The latter might be more efficient in terms of managing multiple property units but they will keep pushing up the prices. It is about affordability. As these smaller landlords are selling up, a lot of the homeless hubs are full and overcrowded, so when the tenant eventually finds a new place the rents have gone up massively and they may not be able to afford to pay those rents. If they are able to pay, it will be with the assistance of the local authority which in years to come will need increased HAP thresholds and payments, and that will come from taxpayers' money and State money, to keep the system going. All that money is coming from one source but it is going to the developers and the big investor funds - the institutional landlords. They are the ones siphoning our collective money away. That is why we need to look at housing as a social enterprise rather than for-profit.
This Bill does make an attempt to do a noble thing. I will not get into attacks on the Government where people say it has no compassion or that everyone is in the pockets of investors. Although historically Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have received a lot of largesse from developers, I believe that has died down as a result of legislation that has been brought in. We do still have cosy relations between politicians and developers at an individual level, however, and we have to think about having a cosier relationship with our constituents – the people who are suffering through increased prices and rents – and think about their common good and everyone’s well-being. That is why I support the amendments. I support the concept of this Bill but we need to look at it more from the perspective of the individual or family living in the house rather than the people making the profit out of it.

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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