Residential Tenancies (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2026: Committee and Remaining Stages Dail Éireann — 2026-02-11 ============================================================ Richard Boyd Barrett (PBP), Dún Laoghaire That is in plain English. Just in case there was any doubt about the motive, at the beginning of this year, the Minister, Deputy Lawless, when discussing the Government's thinking, said: ... housing is about international markets. It is actually a spreadsheet in Zurich, New York or Antwerp, more so than a builder looking at a site in Longford or Roscommon, that is actually deciding what happens here. The point is, it should be the builder in Roscommon or Dublin or wherever it is, looking at the land we have that is zoned, available, serviced and so on. They should be looking at the labour we have available and saying we need houses for the people in this community, so let us build them. If we could do it in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s on a pretty big scale, when the country was virtually a third-world country, we can certainly do it now with enormous budget surpluses and record economic growth. If we look at the Central Bank figures on wealth, I think household wealth in this country is €1.3 trillion now, with about half of it sitting in the banks. The credit unions were banging down the Government's door for years saying they had €4 billion or €5 billion they were willing to put into housing, no problem. On the idea that we do not have suggestions, People Before Profit produced a policy document a few years ago titled, A State Construction Company. Two other parties have similar views on a State construction company. Let us build on the land we have and employ people directly. Rather than them building unaffordable stuff, let us have them build affordable stuff. It is unbelievable what the Government is doing with this Bill in terms of the position of tenants. I would defy any tenant at the end of this to know what sort of tenant they are. Are they a tenant of a big landlord or of a small landlord? Are they a student tenant? There are different rules for them. Are they a tenant post-March 2026 or pre-2026? Even for pre-2026 tenants, there is a different demarcation depending on whether the tenancy is from before or after 2022. We are going to have great fun trying to figure out even what sort of tenants we are talking about and what position they are in. The landlords, however, will know there is an incentive to get these tenants out so they can reset the rents up to the highest possible level. That will mean going on daft.ie and seeing if they can find three rents at €2,500, €3,000, or whatever price. That will be the result of all this. What are we saying? We are saying rents should be based on the ability of people to pay. We are saying people should not be evicted when they have done nothing wrong or, for that matter, as is the case now for lots of people, because they cannot afford unaffordable rents. People should not be evicted for not being able to afford unaffordable rents when more than €24,000 in after-tax income is required to pay the average rent in Dublin now. This is after-tax income, so €33,000 or €34,000 gross of a renter's income has to go to pay an average rent in Dublin. What are we talking about there? It is more than 50% of average earnings. If people cannot pay that, and in many cases it is much higher than that, is it their fault if they get evicted? It is not really, is it? It is the Government's fault that it has let rents go up to that level. Is what we are saying when we say keep rents down to particular levels really so off the charts that nobody else is doing it? Just to be clear, we want to reset rents downward, not just freeze them. I will mention four cities where rent control works. Vienna has a system of rent ceilings so rents cannot be put above a certain level. Some 43% of all the housing in Vienna is social housing and it has hard limits on rent increases. They have rents per square metre which are a fraction of ours - about a third of what people are paying here on average. In Stockholm, a renters' union negotiates the rents on a regular basis with the landlords, rent controls are used to set price ceilings and rents are set based on the utility value of the property. Without those rent controls, it is estimated that rents would be 68% higher in Stockholm than they currently are. Where else has rent controls? Barcelona has them. Rent increases are limited and they have ceilings and so on. Rent controls work there, and Berlin also has rent controls. The things we are proposing, and propose time and again, can be and are done elsewhere. The Government just does not want to do it because it and the landlords find it difficult that they cannot put rents up to the highest possible level. It, therefore, wants to pass legislation that will ensure landlords can do so, despite the housing misery that is causing for people. I think about the families who come in to me - I am sure they must come in to the Minister - saying it is their second year in emergency accommodation and they have been told they are 200th on the housing list. There is no chance of them getting a council house for at least seven or eight years. They are told to go out and find a HAP property. That means finding a property within the homeless HAP rate. They might be allowed to look for something for, say, €2,000 a month. No such thing exists. Imagine how hopeless people feel. They are told to go out and find something within that limit but it does not actually exist out there. Now, the Government is going to make that even more hopeless because people will be looking for rents of €2,500 or €3,000 a month, putting them in an even more hopeless position. For those few people who got a HAP tenancy but are paying a top-up - if they are on a social housing list, they would have to pay a top-up to get a HAP tenancy these days - this has already put them in a difficult position and it is threatening to drive them into arrears at any time. If there are any difficulties in their situation, any extra costs come in for kids or anything like that, they could easily find themselves in difficulty, but now those rents are going to go up. Almost certainly, the HAP rates will not go up to match that. Even if they do, it just means the State is now paying for it. Anyway, they will not go up to the level, so they will be in even more difficulty paying these unaffordable rents. That means they are going to get into trouble, people are going to get into arrears and they are going to get evicted as a result. That is what is actually going on. I do not know how the Minister can possibly justify this. The reason we are here, angry and talking about it is not because we want a social media clip. It is because, next week and in the months after, we are going to have to deal with the human misery that comes through the doors of our offices as a result of what he is doing. That is the reason we are speaking about this and proposing that he abandon this Bill and actually listen to what others are saying. The Government has had its chance and has failed on housing. Maybe it might consider looking at some of the alternative proposals being put forward from this side. --- 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