Residential Tenancies (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2026: Committee and Remaining Stages Dail Éireann — 2026-02-11 ============================================================ Eoin Ó Broin (SF), Dublin Mid-West The Minister of State knows that the only investors who are interested in these kinds of rents are those - the Minister of State was not here earlier so I will repeat it for his benefit - who might invest in the docklands area of Cork and in very high-end, high-cost parts of Dublin. The Minister and the Minister of State are going to ask their constituents to pay somewhere in the region of an extra €3,000 per year for new tenancies. The Minister had an opportunity to dispute the RTB data and he chose not to. If he wants to dispute it, I will be more than interested in hearing his analysis. The Minister and the Minister of State are going to ask new renters in their constituencies to pay additional rent of in the region of €3,000 per year in the absence of extra supply in those constituencies. The very particular category of institutional investors that the Minister is talking about are not coming to County Cork or County Wexford anytime soon. I want to rebut the Minister's assertion. We are here dealing with his legislation. If he wants to have a debate about our solutions, that is fine. We will do it any day he likes, but I will deal with some of them now. This is the Committee Stage debate on the Government's legislation and impact it is going to have on real people in real time in the months ahead. The Minister keeps saying that this rent hike Bill, coupled with the reduction in apartment design standards and the massive tax break for apartment builders is going to lead to a dramatic increase in supply. I have not heard anybody in the industry say that. It will increase some level of supply in certain parts of Dublin and Cork but nowhere else. The cost of that supply is going to be so expensive that the working people many of us represent will not be able to afford it. We need to increase supply and we need to increase social supply. The Government keeps trotting out the line about building more social homes than at any time since the 1970s. In the 1970s, the population of the country was half what it is now. Our social housing waiting lists were a fraction of what they are today. If we make an honest assessment between the position now and that which obtained in the 1970s, we can see that we are delivering less than half of what was delivered then per capita and even less in proportion to need. This is despite the fact that this State has more money than ever before and a capacity to deliver. The Minister also accused us of protecting existing renters. Some 20,000 existing renters get notices of termination every year. These people are now going to have to find other rental accommodation. As a consequence, they will have to pay additional rent. What is happening simply makes no sense. A claim has been made to the effect that security of tenure is being introduced for the first time. Darragh O'Brien came in here in 2023 and said he was introducing tenancies of indefinite duration. He misled this House, because they were not indefinite. Likewise, the Minister is not for the first time introducing security of tenure. The Residential Tenancies Act 2004 involved an element of security of tenure, but there were so many loopholes that many tenants were left behind. Darragh O'Brien's tenancies of indefinite duration had so many loopholes that the same thing happened. Let us look at the Minister's proposals here. New tenants in properties owned by small landlords can still be evicted if the landlord or a spouse needs the property. They can still be evicted on the grounds of financial hardship, ill-defined as it is, or in the context of the need to discharge a debt. Here is the really important one that the Minister did not mention. They can be evicted if they cannot afford the rent. That ground remains in place. If somebody enters into a tenancy at the new market rent and is then hit with 2% or CPI each year, whichever the lowest, and if at any point in the following five years or six years they fall into rent arrears, they will be evicted. The Minister of State is smirking at that remark. Maybe he was not here in this House, when in 2014, 2015 and 2016 huge numbers of families were evicted from their homes because they could not afford double-digit rent increases. That was the reality. That is what drove family homelessness right across this State in those years. If the Minister of State thinks that is funny or something to smirk about, that is okay----- --- 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