Residential Tenancies (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2026: Committee and Remaining Stages
Dail Éireann — 2026-02-11
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Eoin Ó Broin (SF), Dublin Mid-West

The reason this is more like a Second Stage debate is because the Government forced us to have the Committee and Remaining Stages on the floor on the Dáil instead of us having Committee Stage as normal in a committee room where we would have had a completely different type of engagement as we always do. That was an imposition by the Government. We all wanted and argued at the Business Committee that the Committee Stage should be taken in the normal manner. For the Minister, after the Government deliberately decided that this would be the format for Committee Stage, then to criticise that format is not very credible.
I am going to respond specifically to the Minister's issues because, in fact, almost everything I have said during the debate is about the amendments. He accused me of using RTB data to scaremonger. In fact, my assessment of the RTB data is a very modest one. It asks a very simple question. The Government is introducing a change of policy. That change of policy will allow a landlord to reset the rent to market rent between tenancies. It is eminently reasonable to ask: how much will that reset be? The data that allow us to answer that question is from the RTB, which tells us what the current rent is and what the new market rent is in a certain location for a certain type of property. They are the facts. For the Minister to describe the facts as scaremongering when at no stage in the past six months has he put any alternative assessment into place just shows that we are correct.
He also said that the assessment that the RTB's trends on registrations continue into the future is based on a no-change basis. That is not strictly correct. I said that if these trends continue, what is it that leads to new tenancies being created? It is not rent pressure zones, that is for sure. It is that some people in the private rental sector move out because they get social housing; it is nowhere near enough, but some. Some people move out of the private rental sector because they manage to buy a house. Other people move out of the private rental sector because they cannot afford the rent and, because of the Government's policies, they are forced to move back in with family and friends. Some people also emigrate. That frees up rental stock that other people then rent and that is going to continue.
Is the Minister asking me: do I think the trends are going to continue exactly as they are? No, I do not, but all of those elements are going to create a situation where new rental stock will become available that will be covered by the market reset rule and tenants will be affected in their tens of thousands.
I spoke with a large institutional landlord last year. This is a landlord that does not evict on sale. This is a landlord that does not evict on family member grounds. This is a landlord that will only move to evict if the tenant breaches contract. It is one of the largest institutional landlords in the State. What does the Minister think its rental turnover is every year? What does he think its rental turnover is in terms of the churn within their tenancies? Has he ever stopped to ask any of the large institutional investors that effectively currently operate a policy of no-fault evictions what their churn is? In the case of this significant player in the market, its turnover is about 25% of tenancies annually. It is remarkably similar to the RTB's data. This is a landlord currently operating a no-fault eviction policy and it still has a 25% turnover every year. That is one of the reasons what company through its lobbyist, Irish Institutional Property, lobbied for this. They know that once this is through, all of their rents will reset to market rent every four years. I suspect that the Minister knows that. I suspect from the conversations he has had that he is fully aware of it.
The information that we put into the public domain this week and put on the Dáil record in more detail about new tenancy registration trends and the cost of the market reset is factual. Of course, whether those things transpire for every individual renter in the time ahead is a separate question but we will have plenty of data to deal with that.
The Minister said that we are moving from a temporary situation to a permanent one. That temporary situation lasted a decade, and it is because the Government made such a mess of the rent pressure zone legislation. Just as RPZs were permanent for a decade, there is going to be further changes to this legislation because of the mess the Government is making of it.
With respect to security of tenure, under section 8, there are still significant grounds for eviction for new tenants of small landlords. Are they the same as under section 34 of the current Residential Tenancies Act? They are not. They are slightly more restricted, but the landlord will still be able to evict where the dwelling is needed by him or her or a more narrowly defined family member group than before to avoid undue hardship, but also in cases where the landlord has a debt discharge.
There is an interesting question that I want the Minister to answer. What is the status of an eviction at the end of an existing Part 4 tenancy for a tenant who has an existing Part 4 tenancy prior to June or July 2022? As he knows, those tenancies will come to the end of their first cycle in 2027 or 2028 when the landlord can issue a notice of termination on no grounds and strictly speaking under law that would not be seen as a no-fault eviction. Are those tenants protected under the Government's new rules? In terms of the landlord resetting the rent for the next tenant to market rent at the beginning, will the landlord be able to avail of that?
The interesting thing about the eviction levels at the end of existing Part 4 tenancies is that when the no grounds rule was available, it was hardly ever used. Will we see a glut of landlords availing of that come 2028? Again, the legislation does not speak to it, but I am interested in the Minister's view.
It also ignores the fact that someone can be evicted if they cannot afford the rent because of the rate at which it is rising and fall into arrears. That is an experience that far too many families who ended up in homelessness lived with in 2014, 2015 and 2016.
No-fault evictions are not being ended for all new tenancies. The Minister is correct that they are for the tenants of larger landlords, although for many of those tenants that is currently the default position anyway, but for tenants in new tenancies of small landlords, which is currently about 44% of the market, there will still be grounds for no-fault evictions, albeit they will be slightly more restricted than before.
I am not going to continue this discussion, but I would be interested to hear the Minister's view on whether a landlord who avails of that termination at the end of an existing Part 4 tenancy, pre-2022 will be able to avail of the market reset at the start of a new tenancy on foot of that eviction.

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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