Residential Tenancies (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2026: Committee and Remaining Stages
Dail Éireann — 2026-02-11
============================================================

Eoin Ó Broin (SF), Dublin Mid-West

I will tell him what happened. Homelessness rose. I know it is funny. I know the Minister of State thinks it is hilarious. As a consequence of the policies of the Minister of State's party, real people ended up in emergency accommodation who should never have ended up there. That is the consequences of what you guys do, and you are doing it again. You are doing it in a far more serious manner than you have done in a decade. That is why none of us on this side of the House will make any apologies for highlighting the real-world impacts on real people of the Government's legislation.
The Government can try to distract all it wants when it comes to social media clips in a way that makes it seem as if nobody on the Government benches uses social media. The Minister seems to be getting a little better at it. Social media clips do not hide rising homelessness numbers. They do not hide rising rents. They do not hide a Government that continues to miss almost all of its targets. I look forward to debating the social and affordable housing output figures for 2025 when they are eventually released. I suspect the targets in that regard will have been missed as well.
This is terrible legislation. It is going to have profoundly negative impacts on tens of thousands of people. The fact that the Minister cannot even acknowledge that or respond to the factual information we have put to him shows that despite my very generous colleague's assertion to the contrary, the Minister has not made any mistake at all. He is doing this deliberately. He is doing it knowingly. While he might be hiding from the evidence, he is doing this because he has chosen to do it in full knowledge of the consequences and the cost. Shame on both the Minister and Minister of State for doing this.

---

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