Residential Tenancies (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2026: Committee and Remaining Stages Dail Éireann — 2026-02-11 ============================================================ Eoin Ó Broin (SF), Dublin Mid-West I am quite happy to engage. If this was a proper Committee Stage debate, we would be able to have these types of engagements. That is one of the things we have been denied. Let us be very clear. Double-digit rental inflation leaves renters unable to pay their rent. They get into rent arrears, they get a notice of termination for non-payment of rent and they get evicted. That is what happens. What is the Government proposing for new renters in County Carlow? Potential rent increases in the first year of 29%. For County Cavan, it is 29%. For County Clare, it is 26.9%. For Cork, including the county, it is 25%. The figure for the city is 20%. It goes on and on. In the context of the market reset, not a single county or city will have a rent increase in the first year of less than 17% or 18%. For some, it will be as high as 35%. That is what the Government is proposing. If the Minister is right and this leads to an increase in supply at some point - let us imagine that thesis is correct - who made him to think that it is acceptable for renters to have to pay the extortionate rents necessary to bring about that increase? It beggars belief that the Minister cannot be at least honest and say in order to attract the very specific kind of institutional investment that the Government believes is necessary, it is going to have to have ever greater rip-off rents which, like existing rents, people simply cannot afford. I will come to the alternative and to private sector investment in a moment The Minister also likes to say that people on this side of this House have nothing to say about private sector investment. In fact, I have probably spent more time talking about alternative and better forms of private sector investment than the Minister. The missing piece of our private sector housing crisis is not high-end, high-density, high-cost private rental. That is not our problem. The missing part is a failure on the part of the Government to support and activate the small and medium-sized builder-developer sector to build significantly more good-quality private homes at more moderated prices in every county in the State. The Government could deal with that by fixing the problems facing the sector. Action in that regard is entirely absent. The Minister repeated a line used by the Taoiseach to the effect that the 240,000 tenancies currently in place will not be impacted. What the Government completely ignores in this regard is the RTB data I quoted at the outset to the effect that for every quarter for the past two and half years, 25% of all registered tenancies have been new first-time tenancies. The private rental sector is in a state of constant churn for a variety of reasons. If those trends continue, within four years, almost all tenants in the private rental sector will be captured by the market reset. Ultimately, some will not be captured until year six, but that is what the Government is proposing. It has been stated that the greatest driver of homeless is the crisis in the private rental sector. In fact, that is not strictly true. The greatest driver of homelessness is the failure of the State over the past number of decades, including under this Government, to deliver a volume of social homes to meet the needs of people who need social housing. The lack of such homes forces people into the private rental sector for extended periods. When they eventually become homeless, they remain in emergency accommodation for far too long. Again, this is because of the Government's failure to provide adequate social housing. There are plenty of solutions on this side of this House. However, what the Minister has ignored and has tacitly accepted is that tens of thousands of renters in new tenancies from the start of March are going to be hit with rent increases of the order of €3,000 to €5,000 annually. That is what the data from the Residential Tenancies Board indicates. I would happily give the Minister an hour of my speaking time because I would love him to outline the analysis of this that allows him to shake his head. His officials told us that they were not asked to produce any analysis to underpin this Bill. The Housing Agency was not asked to produce any analysis to underpin this Bill either. None of the academic experts in our universities who specialise in the private rental sector were asked to carry out an analysis. Unless the Minister has an analysis that he has been hiding from us all, then either the RTB data is correct and he must accept it and live by it or he has to produce something else. We are going to go through other aspects of the Bill as we proceed. I would have thought that the Minister would at least have been honest enough to say that the primary purpose of the Bill is to allow rents to rise. That the Government has made a calculated assessment in order to attract a certain category of institutional investment, that those involved want rental yields even greater than what the new private sector stock is getting now and that the Government has said "That is no problem. Off you go." The Minister is right that there was an increase in the number of apartment completions last year. Almost all of those apartments were bought by the State. Virtually no new private sector investment acquired any of them. Therefore, the idea that somehow the completion figures, including those relating to apartments, for the end of last year are in any way is a justification for what is happening is simply unbelievable. I am going to make a wager. In six months, let us come back and have a debate on the impact of this Bill. In 12 months, if the Minister is still in office, he should come back in here and we will have a debate. Schedule such a debate and allocate Government time. --- 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