Residential Tenancies (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2026: Committee and Remaining Stages
Dail Éireann — 2026-02-11
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Paul Murphy (PBP), Dublin South-West

I will briefly respond to some of what the Minister said, though first I will note that we can see the impact of the guillotine. We are still on the first amendment and we are going to run out of debating time relatively soon. When the Minister made the point that the Government is not ramming it through, his excuse for how it is not ramming it through is because it announced the legislation last year, in August, but that is precisely the point. He announced the policy proposal last year, which is fine, and absolutely his right, but we are debating it, having voted on Second Stage just a few hours ago, and will do Committee and Remaining Stages in five hours. It will be guillotined three weeks out from this being implemented. That is ramming it through. There would be no ramming it through if the Minister had brought in the legislation in September or October, if we had debated it and so on. The Minister is absolutely ramming it through. That the Minister announced it a long time ago and did not bring forward the legislation so it could be scrutinised and amended precisely proves the point about him ramming it through rather than disproving it.
It is interesting that the Minister admits that we currently have a situation of misery. He admits that but says that his Bill is a way to avoid making that misery permanent. I will take the first part of that first of all. We currently have a situation of misery for renters, for people who are trying to buy their homes, for homeless people, and for half a million young people trapped at home. A system of misery has been widely created in the housing system, affecting many people. How did we get here? Shall we have a look at how we got here? If the Government accepts that we have a situation of misery and the Opposition says we have a situation of misery, how did we get here? We got here with Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, but the key point in a way is not that those parties that are responsible for it, but that the policies pursued by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael got us to this point. I have been listening to the debate and the policies that were pursued have been set out in great detail. They involved a move away from the delivery of social housing at any scale. There has been an increase in recent years but there has almost been a complete collapse. The policy has been that the market will provide. It has involved incentivising landlords and developers to come into the market and making sure they can make as much profit as they need to make. That is the essence of the approach of the Government and what has got us to the point of housing misery.
I always make the point that I remember in the 2016 general election campaign that homelessness and the housing crisis were emerging as a significant issue. By that stage, we had fewer than 5,000 people homeless. Later on, it was said that when we reached 10,000, that would be a breaking point and that people would not stand going over 10,000. In the 2020 general election, we were over 10,000. By the 2024 general election, we were well over 15,000, and now we are on a trajectory to 20,000, which will be met rapidly if the Government gets its way and manages to implement this approach. That is the consequence of those housing policies. One follows the other. Some people have got very rich in the meantime from that. It is a massive transfer of wealth from the many to the few. What is different about this Government, this housing policy and what is in the Bill? This is just supercharging the policies we have had up until now. It is going in the same direction that has got us to this point but just going faster.
It is all this trickle-down idea that if we invite in these people and make it clear to them that they can make loads of money, and that if we give a windfall of €20 million to IRES REIT, it will invest more money because it thinks it will be able to make more profits, and then, in the long run, rents will come down. That is effectively what the Government says its position is: that there will be pain in the short term and rents will rise for people, but the investment will come in and in the long run we will have a better housing market. It is effectively what the Government has been doing for the last ten years, though not at the scale or speed of increases that the Government is now introducing. The result is the misery that the Minister admits has been created.
The Minister's point about social media clips was ironic. The Government says things all the time for social media clips and it is pushed out, just to say it so many times that people think there must be something to it. The Minister said that the Opposition has not put forward any proposals or alternatives. I do not know how he can say it. He has been listening to us. He might not agree with what is being put forward but it is clear that the amendments, like our amendments, contain alternative proposals. He might not think the proposals will work but they are clearly alternatives. Alternative positions have been raised repeatedly in the course of the debate, calling for a ban on economic evictions, which we know works. We know it does not stop homelessness or people entering homelessness, but we know that it significantly slows it down. We know that because we have done it, and when we get rid of it, the speed of people entering homelessness goes up faster. We have said we want real rent controls which reduce rents to affordable levels and we have pointed to the need for State investment and a State construction company to build social and affordable homes.
It is just not very serious for the Minister to say he has not heard any alternative proposals when we are literally debating amendments which have alternative proposals. The Government's approach on this issue is horrendously cynical. One part of it is to try to normalise the housing crisis and make it like the health crisis, which every opinion poll turns up as a significant issue. When asked what a big issue is for them, people say the health crisis. The Government has normalised the idea that it is such a big crisis and it is a black hole which money can be thrown at, but it can never really be resolved, to try to neuter it as a political issue. Successive Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael Governments have done that reasonably effectively on the issue of the health crisis. Effectively the Government's approach to the housing crisis is to do the same. It is to get people to accept as normal that we will hit 20,000 people in emergency accommodation and that we will go beyond that, and to accept that rents will increase even faster, to €3,000 or more, as a consequence of this Bill - that is just the way it is.
Some elements of the Government, backed up by some toxic parts of politics, are playing a dirty game of blaming not those at the top but the most vulnerable people in our society, suggesting that asylum seekers are adding to people in emergency accommodation or whatever. Not only is this stuff factually inaccurate, but it is a dirty trick designed to distract attention away from Fianna Fáil, from Fine Gael and from those who benefit from the housing crisis. The other part of the Government strategy is to suggest that there is no alternative and that nobody has any policies. We can do whatever we want about policies, such as writing books, but we will still hear the Government say that these people have no ideas. The Government says it day in, day out on social media clips just to create the idea that there is no alternative. "There is no alternative" is the mantra that is pushed on people. It is incumbent on us to get the message across that there is an alternative and it starts from the opposite point of view. The Government starts from the point of view of what will make landlords and developers happy. When it is speaking to the public, it adds onto that the idea that it will close the viability gap, which is this new term that has entered politics just in the last year or so and has become the thing to dress up how the Government wants to make developers and institutional investors have even more profits than they currently have.
Our starting point is instead what will resolve the housing crisis. What will mean the basic thing of people being able to access affordable, quality, decent housing? It should not be too much to ask in one of the richest countries in the world in 2026, but if one starts from that standpoint, one comes up with a Bill that points in the opposite direction to what the Government is doing in the main with this Bill and comes up with things like the amendments that we are debating today.

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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