Residential Tenancies (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2026: Committee and Remaining Stages Dail Éireann — 2026-02-11 ============================================================ Richard Boyd Barrett (PBP), Dún Laoghaire I really am furious at the Minister's comments that this debate is about social media clips. It diminishes the seriousness of what is at stake here. I have been a Member of this House since 2011. I was here two or three months when a circular was produced by the then Department of the environment, within which responsibility for housing was a matter for a Minister of State rather than having a Ministry in its own right. That was because we did not then have the homelessness and housing crisis we have now. The need for housing to come under a senior Ministry arose from the housing crisis that commenced a few years later. There was no fanfare and no press releases from the then Fine Gael-Labour Party in respect of the circular of 2011. It basically said the Government was stopping direct capital investment in public housing and would instead outsource its provision. The word "HAP" did not appear at that point but it was the beginning of the idea. RAS was in place at the time but HAP had not yet arrived. I remember putting out a press release and holding a press briefing, which only one journalist attended. I tried to explain that the Government was proposing, in effect, to do away with the direct provision of social housing and that this would be a disaster. I remember when HAP was introduced during the term of the then Minister of State, Jan O'Sullivan. The debate in this House went on for hours as we tried to explain why the scheme was going to be a disaster because it would replace social housing provision by the State with outsourcing of provision to the private sector. Of course, that turned out to be the case. The other big feature of that policy was the then Minister for Finance, Michael Noonan, meeting with representatives of the vulture funds that were invited in to buy up all the distressed property. It was a deliberate policy. He met with people from 65 or so vulture funds in 2013 and basically asked them to take over all the distressed property in the hands of NAMA. We said it would be a disaster. For a brief while, the then Government had the housing sector in its hands. If it had started building public and affordable housing then instead of doing the exact opposite, we would not be in this mess at all. It had the assets and so on. A point worth making regarding foreign private investment is that the houses that are built are built by labour in this country. When talking about capital from abroad, all the money is digits on a computer screen but the homes are built on land here, by people here and with materials sourced here. Those people are either building stuff that is affordable, like social and affordable housing, or they are building to make a profit, which is what is happening at the moment. What they are building is unaffordable. Of course, they are building hotels and things like that as well because it is profitable to do so. Forgetting about all the digital figures floating around, there is a finite amount of labour, land and materials, regardless of whether it is being used to build affordable and social housing or to build something else. It was often not doing anything at all because, for periods of time, the people who controlled the land, the labour and the capital decided they would not build anything until it was profitable enough to do so, and that is what they did. A lot of the people who got the distressed assets from NAMA at a discount price sat on them or leaked the stuff very slowly. This is a very important point that the Minister needs to understand. Never, ever, are the investors he is looking to court, lure and incentivise here going to build to the point that their profits go down. Why would they? At the point at which they think their profits are going to go down, they are going to stop. That is what they will do. The idea that we will get to a magical point somewhere where rents and house prices go down somehow is just total fantasy. The only instance of that is a massive crash. That is what we actually got the last time we had this mad policy of dancing to the investors' tune. It never really stopped but the dire crash of 2008 resulted from this madness of doing what they tell the Government. Then the housing crisis ensued. At that time, for example, it was unknown, for me in Dún Laoghaire and for most people in the country, to have families with kids in emergency accommodation. It just never happened. There was a particular profile to people who were in emergency accommodation. They were often very vulnerable. You did not have families with kids in homeless accommodation when I first came into the Dáil. Now, it is absolutely normalised and it will increase because of this. Then, the Minister comes forward with a Bill and says, to use his own words, "We do not want rents for long-term tenancies to fall behind market rents". That is the purpose of this Bill. Under no circumstances must we have low rents. That is what the Minister is saying. --- 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