Residential Tenancies (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2026: Committee and Remaining Stages Dail Éireann — 2026-02-11 ============================================================ Richard Boyd Barrett (PBP), Dún Laoghaire It is worthwhile at times, when we are discussing these things, which can seem quite dry and technical, to just remind ourselves of the human reality. Literally every week, I have somebody coming in to me who is facing a date for eviction. This week, given the particular week that is in it, I had a lovely young couple come in to me. Both of them have been working. They are probably about their mid-20s. They are a lovely couple. Throughout the whole engagement with this couple, they had with them their young son, who has special needs. He is about two or three - a lovely little fellow. He has the same name as my son, coincidentally. He was sitting there smiling at me the whole time during the meeting. His mother was just bawling crying the whole time. Her partner had to keep reaching over to hold her because, as much as she was trying to keep it together to explain the situation they were in, she just kept getting overwhelmed with fear because their date for eviction is this week. They have done absolutely nothing wrong, nothing at all. They are terrified about the prospect of what is going to happen to them and their child with special needs. Both of them told me that they themselves, later in life, have been diagnosed with special needs and are on the spectrum. They are finding it really difficult to cope with all the forms they have to fill out, and trying to understand HAP, homeless HAP and the thresholds. If they get the working family payment, what might that mean? Would it drive them over the social housing income threshold and make their situation even worse? They asked if there was anything I could do, and so on. When you look at their position on the list, you would think not, unless these people get prioritised, and to get prioritised is extremely difficult. The bar is getting higher and higher to get medical priority because a feature of these things is people who often are not doctors second-guessing people who are writing letters on behalf of people, where doctors say this person should be prioritised, that this kid should not go into homelessness because it would be really bad for them, or that this person because of their disability should not be in a hostel. The council, because it has nowhere to put them anyway, says it cannot prioritise them because it is not a severe enough disability. My question to the Minister is whether anything can justify this. Can anything justify the tears of that mother? Can anything justify that little child who is about two or three with special needs being driven into a hostel in town? They are absolutely terrified. I do not think they will go to a hostel in town, to tell the truth. I would say they would probably do almost anything bar go there. It is a long way out from any sort of family support networks they have in Dún Laoghaire, but that is what people get offered most of the time in Dún Laoghaire because we do not even have enough emergency accommodation there. People get sent into town to a hostel. They might be in there, and then after a year or two they might get into emergency accommodation in Dún Laoghaire. Then they do not know how long they might be there. They could be just languishing there for God knows how long. Can anything justify that being done to those people, in the Minister of State's mind? Can anything justify them being evicted in that circumstance to satisfy the investors, to incentivise? What we are being told is that has to be done, to incentivise the investors. It is a small landlord, by the way, doing that. They were not saying awful things about the small landlord. It is you guys who manage the sector. It is you guys who create and sustain a sector that allows that to happen. To my mind, if the consequence of the sort of rental sector we set up is that this happens to this family and this child, there is something wrong. There is something wrong with that. It is just not right for that to happen to that child or that mother. It is just not right; I do not care what justification the Minister of State wants to try to put on it. We know, as a Deputy said earlier, that it is people with spreadsheets in Antwerp and New York looking at Dublin and saying they cannot put the rent up to €2,500 in certain circumstances so they might not build there, because it is not profitable enough. The human consequence is that lovely couple, the tears and the child going in. To my mind that is State neglect. We passed that referendum on children and passed the Children First guidelines, which say the State is culpable of an abuse if a child is neglected. To my mind, the State is guilty of an abuse of that child and of the wilful neglect of the well-being of that child if the child is allowed to go into homelessness. I hear the Government say it is working on prevention of people going into homelessness. No, it is not. It is allowing that to happen. It thinks that in order to incentivise investors, this is legitimate. It is not legitimate. It is illegitimate. It is absolutely outrageous that it can be allowed to happen. Can the Minister of State honestly stand over that situation? That is just this week's example for me in my office. I am sure others can talk about their experiences in the last week or two of the same desperate situations. It really struck me just how confused and desperate and helpless people were, pleading for help, and I am just thinking there is nothing I can do because that is allowed. It is allowed that they can be thrown out and allowed that they have nowhere to be sent but a hostel. Very often in my area people say they would rather sleep in their car or pitch a tent somewhere than go into town into those hostels. That is the human reality of it all. The Government has a choice not to do that and say it is not acceptable. It is done in other countries. The Government says it is not evicting people into homelessness, that that is not going to happen because it is wrong, and it can do something else to make sure that does not happen. It can provide secure, affordable housing for people like that couple and their child. --- 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