Residential Tenancies (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2026: Committee and Remaining Stages Dail Éireann — 2026-02-11 ============================================================ Rory Hearne (SD), Dublin North-West Rather than answer the question of when rents will go up, how much they will go up by, when they are going to fall and giving any sort of sense of what will happen, the Minister just comes back with "supply, supply, supply". Supply is the answer to the housing crisis, but it is not the only answer. Housing systems across the world also have things such as rent controls, protection from evictions and measures for security of tenure, which the Minister himself claims this Bill is about. It is not all just about supply, supply, supply. Even if we take it that it is all about supply, it is about the type of supply. What type of supply are we building? The type of supply the Government is incentivising is one that is really expensive and unaffordable to the overwhelming majority of people. It is the supply of housing that I have problems with and, to be very straight, the institutional investors who are here. These funds and this model of housing are hugely problematic. Unlike the Minister, I have researched and worked in housing for over two decades. Academics, researchers and campaigners have analysed what the financialisation of housing is. Does the Minister know what the financialisation of housing is? It is a process whereby housing has been turned into an investment commodity and an asset. International real estate funds and wealth funds have been driving that agenda for over two decades. The Minister puts the real estate investment trusts across as if they are some sort of people who are here to help us out, but the Government is giving them our rents and tax breaks worth hundreds of millions. They are not here to help us out. They are here to maximise the rent and profits they can get. They are not here to provide affordable housing. They are here to lock as many people as possible into as high a rent as possible for as long as possible. That is their model. The Minister knows, because he is talking to them, that their financial model is based on an ongoing increasing rate of return. How do they get that? From ongoing, increasing rents. That is their model. We are building in a fundamentally problematic form of housing that is based on ever-increasing rents. These are the rents of institutional investment funds and corporate landlords, such as Kennedy Wilson, IRES REIT and Greystar. The Minister says there is no issue with this, but one in five of all rental properties in Dublin is now owned by institutional landlords and it is heading towards one in four. He claims that our policies will lead to housing misery in perpetuity, but the Government is embedding a permanent form of unaffordable housing supply that is not about delivering housing or homes but is about delivering investment commodities. I will come back to the Minister on the petty taunts that he threw claiming that I was only doing this for social media clips. He used terms such as "word spaghetti" and said that we are peddling in misery. What I am doing is not peddling in misery. It is highlighting the human cost of what the Government's policies are. I am talking about how its rent hikes will devastate people, cause rising homelessness and how it is inflicting massive misery. The misery here is what the Government is doing is normalising the misery of the highest number of evictions since the Famine. If the Minister throws petty taunts around, I will come back to say to him that what we are doing is, number one, highlighting the human cost, which he is unwilling to accept, and the solutions he is unwilling to accept. He said we have no solutions but we have put them out there. They are a rent freeze, a ban on no-fault evictions, a public construction company and investment from the €166 billion that is in private money. Solutions are there. It is really pathetic of the Minister to try to claim that we are somehow doing this for social media. For the last ten years, I have been highlighting the scandal of homelessness in this country. Ten years ago, I walked as part of a small march that was one of the first groups of families who are homeless. A child was walking that in her school uniform, with a little sticker on her back stating, "Help me. I am homeless". I am unlike the Minister. He has supported Governments for the past decade and stood over year after year of rising homelessness and not once did he speak out and say this is a scandal and that we should not accept one child being homeless. He voted, in the confidence and supply agreement, with Fine Gael and, since 2020, he has been in the Government and not once did he stand up and say what we are doing is wrong and that we should not accept one child as homeless. What did he do? He voted for the lifting of the eviction bans, which led to more people going into homelessness. One of the other decisions, which I described at the time as one of the cruellest decisions any Irish Government has ever made, was making a policy and lifting a ban on evictions when it knew it would lead to rising homelessness. What has it resulted in? Thousands of children being made homeless. For the Minister to claim I am doing this for social media clips is a disgraceful comment to make. It is absolutely disgraceful. I come here every day to represent the families and children across the country and in my constituency who suffer and whose lives are being damaged by the Government's policy failures. That is the truth. That is the reality the Minister does not want to face. The Minister's rental Bill will lead to more human misery and he is prepared to accept that as a price because he thinks it will lead to some supply with an increase of large institutional investor-funded apartments and he accepts the people who will not be able to afford the rents and will be made homeless as the collateral damage. It is a disgrace and I will keep calling it out in the passionate way I do and in a way that highlights that this is a social catastrophe that is causing massive human misery. I will not let one day go by when I will not call that out. --- 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