Residential Tenancies (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2026: Committee and Remaining Stages Dail Éireann — 2026-02-11 ============================================================ Rory Hearne (SD), Dublin North-West It is deeply disappointing that the Minister of State is rejecting these amendments. I also cannot wrap my head around the fact that the Minister, Deputy Browne, said he does not tolerate or accept one child being homeless. Right now, the Minister of State could prevent thousands of children becoming homeless in the coming months by agreeing to this amendment but he is not doing it. He shakes his head, but of course he could. The Minister of State, Deputy Cummins, referred to the emergency situation during Covid. This is an emergency situation. Of course he could if he wanted to. The constitutional right to private property is mitigated by the principles of social justice, as he knows, and the common good. In this case, I challenge the Minister to introduce it as we have put forward here. I challenge him to implement that and see what landlord is going to come forward, bring it to court and see if it does not stand up. The Minister will not do that just like the Government will not have a referendum to hold a right to housing to make housing a human right because it does not believe that it is a human right. As I said earlier, it is willingly accepting homelessness and levels of homelessness that are absolutely intolerable and has done for years. I do not see it as normal or acceptable for a child being homeless, but the Minister does despite his claims to the contrary. If he did not, he would implement a no-fault eviction ban that would prevent thousands of families and their children becoming homeless. The homeless figures that we get each month are only the tip of the iceberg. Thousands more are being made homeless but going into situations of hidden homelessness. Deputy Boyd Barrett was right to outline the human cost of this and what the human reality is, which I also spoke about earlier. What is really sad right now is that we do not talk about the children anymore. We do not talk about the situations in Temple Street that I spoke about years ago where the doctors explained that they were seeing and are continuing to see, but no one talks about it, children presenting with their families with burns because they were in cramped emergency accommodation pulling kettles down on themselves. Babies were not learning to crawl because literally the space is not there. It is still going on. There are children right now in hotels, hostels and family hubs whose lives are being irreparably damaged by growing up in emergency accommodation. That is an emergency. That is the experience of thousands of children. I cannot get my head around how the Government will not implement a measure that it knows would prevent that for more children. The homeless services say that the eviction ban did prevent people going into homelessness and opened up a space where they could then work on getting those in emergency accommodation out. They were not dealing with a constant flow in of homelessness. That is one of the really frustrating aspects of the Bill. The Minister said the security of tenure this is going to introduce is historic and huge. As I have said over and over, it does nothing for the hundreds of thousands of existing renters. Yet the Minister could do it. He could accept this amendment. It is so frustrating to be here knowing that he could do something that would prevent homelessness, but he will not do it. It is a disgrace. It makes hollow all these claims he has made that he cares about homelessness, and he is treating it as an emergency. No, he is not. To treat it as an emergency would be to implement a no-fault eviction ban across the board. He said that landlords will flee and more landlords will sell up. If there was a no-fault eviction ban and a landlord did sell up, the family or individual would still be there. They could sell their property as they do in other countries, such as Belgium. Why will the Minister not do that? It is because he will not step up and state, "We believe housing is a human right. This is an emergency. We will take these measures." The Government is introducing a Bill that still very much does not addressing fundamental causes of our housing and homelessness crisis. We will continue to see it. Instead, the Government is going to make it much worse with higher rents. --- 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