Residential Tenancies (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2026: Committee and Remaining Stages Dail Éireann — 2026-02-11 ============================================================ Richard Boyd Barrett (PBP), Dún Laoghaire Most of the points have been made about these amendments. I want the Minister to try to explain at what point he seriously believes the supply he is talking about is going to lead to a reduction in rents. Will he give us some indication? I think it is total fantasy. In the explanatory memorandum to the Bill and in his speech introducing the Bill, the Minister said that rents for long-standing tenancies should not fall behind the market. That is what the investors want. They are saying that if they have to deal with rents that are lower than the market, they are not going to build because the Government's rent controls are too restrictive as far as they are concerned and limit their ability to charge €2,500 or €3,000 per month. Therefore, they want the Government to get rid of them in order to incentivise them to come in and build. Is the Minister honestly saying to me that he thinks that if he does this, rents will fall at some point? I am interested to hear when he thinks that point is going to arrive because it has never happened before except during the crash and even then it did not happen for very long. Rents went down after the crash but only briefly. Can he tell me when he thinks rents are going to come down? Probably if he even thinks about that question, the likelihood that rents are ever going to come down is a total mirage and fantasy. Does he honestly believe that an average rent of, say, €30,000 per year or €2,500 per month, which is about €30,000 of after-tax income, is a reasonable level of rent to have in the capital city? How does he think people are supposed to pay that? I know very few people who think that is a sustainable rent. We have had a long debate on this amendment, so the last point I will make concerns why the Government keeps recycling the mythology that there has been a big exodus of landlords. There has not been a big exodus of landlords. There has been an increase in landlords. In 2023, there were 101,000 landlords in the country. I am sorry, that is not right. I do not have the right figures in front of me. In any event, the number of landlords has increased since 2023 and the number of tenancies has increased, so the private rental sector has increased and the number of landlords has increased over the past two years. If the Minister's argument is that unless we do this, there will be a continued exodus, I suggest that there is a problem with his logic. Some might be leaving but there is a net increase in the number of people. The reason for this is because huge profits are being made by people who are landlords. How could huge profits not be made when they are charging the sort of extortionate rents that currently exist out in the market? --- 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