Residential Tenancies (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2026: Committee and Remaining Stages Dail Éireann — 2026-02-11 ============================================================ Richard Boyd Barrett (PBP), Dún Laoghaire It was interesting to hear what the Minister of State said in response to the instance that I set out of the couple and their child. I was just looking through the details of the case. They brought their youngest child with them. As I was reading over the details of the case, I realised that they have a daughter as well. Their son is two-years-old with special needs and autism. He was just diagnosed. They also have a nine-year-old daughter who has complex special needs. I was looking at the email they sent me describing their extreme anxiety and concern about what homelessness would mean and all of that for them in terms of the services that they are trying to access. They are waiting for those services as well to get an occupational therapist for their kid and what they will do if they have to move to another area even if they tried to move to another area. It is interesting that the homeless HAP limit that they were given to allow them to look for somewhere is high as €2,525. They are looking all the time and cannot find anywhere. The Minister wants those rents to go even higher. They will in my area. They will go up to €3,000 and €3,500. In the hopeless situation that they are in, all the Minister of State said is that they should engage with the local authority about emergency accommodation. I said to him that what they are being told, and families like them are being told week in and week out, is to go to a hostel in Dublin city centre with their kids, which they would be absolutely terrified to do. That is why the mother of these children kept bursting into tears. I could see it. She was envisaging in her head the prospect of bringing her kids into a hostel. She immediately burst into tears. Her partner was desperately trying to comfort her. Has the Minister of State got any other advice? We are asking for the prevention of evictions of vulnerable children like these and of two lovely parents in their 20s, who are both working hard to try to make their way in life and contribute to society. If the Minister will not do what is asked for in these amendments, which is to prevent people like them from being evicted into homelessness, can he offer anything more than saying, when I have explained the reality of the situation, that they should engage with the local authority regarding emergency accommodation? Given where they are on the list, they will be languishing in emergency housing for years. Let us be under absolutely no illusion that already vulnerable children with special needs will be damaged by that experience, possibly forever. There is not a shadow of a doubt about it. The best we can offer them and the many people like them is to say they should engage with the local authority. This point is relevant to the provisions in the Bill. In the case of the parents I mentioned, because their daughter will soon turn ten, their need is for a three-bedroom home. When there are children of opposite sexes, they are not supposed to share a room after one of them reaches ten years of age. The parents now must look for three-bedroom accommodation, which is completely impossible to find. People can forget about getting such a property from the council. We are talking about being on the list for a decade. In their desperation, the parents asked whether there was any chance they could look for a two-bedroom property. It would still be very difficult to find one under HAP but there might be some chance of it. However, that is not allowed because it would mean they were moving into overcrowding. This is the dilemma. We go to the council and suggest that people in this desperate situation, to avoid homelessness, be allowed to move into an overcrowded place. Of course, if these parents are made homeless in the next week, which is the deadline by which they must leave, they will definitely be overcrowded if they have to go into a hostel in the city. Indeed, it will be worse overcrowding because they will probably all be in one room together, as are many of the homeless families with whom I deal. We can put such families into one bedroom in emergency accommodation but the councils cannot give them a two-bedroom home because that is deemed to be overcrowding and not to meet their housing need. There is a dilemma here for local authorities and it will be even more so the case if this Bill is enacted, because one of the grounds on which evictions are still allowed is that landlords, big and small, can evict if their property is not suitable to a family's needs, which includes where there is overcrowding. That is a justification for evicting families. We really are on the horns of a dilemma in that families might have a chance of getting a property that is very far from perfect and in which they will be overcrowded but if they do so, they are then vulnerable to eviction by a landlord. The latter might say the property is not suitable to their needs if at any point that landlord decides he or she could get more rent by getting in people for whom the property is deemed appropriate to their needs. That is the mess we are in, or more to the point, that is the mess in which families in this situation find themselves. They are absolutely terrified for the well-being of their children and for themselves. The Minister could stop this, even on a temporary basis. He said we should thank God we are not in a pandemic. The dictionary definition of "pandemic" does not just refer to a global epidemic but is also applicable to something affecting a whole country. There is, in fact, a pandemic in Ireland. There is a pandemic of homelessness and a pandemic of housing crisis. If ever a housing and homelessness crisis could be described as a pandemic, it is the one we are living through. It is a pandemic in the literal meaning of the word and it justifies taking emergency measures to prevent damage being done to the children who will be homeless if we do not come up with a better answer than sending their parents to engage with the local authority about emergency accommodation in Dublin city centre. --- 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