Housing and Residential Tenancies (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2026: Report and Final Stages Dail Éireann — 2026-07-08 ============================================================ Eoin Ó Broin (SF), Dublin Mid-West I am even less convinced of the logic of prescribing a time in the legislation. "Night to night" has a very clear meaning. It means a person does not get a placement of a month, six months or 18 months. It means accommodation is provided on a night-to-night basis. That is a long-standing policy that currently exists, and some emergency accommodation providers are paid for that. If the Minister had wanted to be helpful to local authorities, he could have provided guidance. The difficulty is that by putting this in legislation, it suggests that where the night-to-night safety net is to be provided, somebody cannot be accommodated before 8 p.m. The Minister has put that in the legislation. Normally when we ask for specific details in legislation, we are told it is not the place for them. That raises very real questions. Does it mean the emergency accommodation provided under this amendment can only open at 8 p.m. and must close at 8 a.m.? That becomes the operational procedure irrespective of, as I said, whether it is in the best interests of the child or is not appropriate for the adults. Second, the idea that the solution to not providing for an appeal is that somebody can just keep reapplying makes no sense. That just adds administrative burden for the local authorities, if such a thing were the primary concern. It also ignores the fact people who present for emergency accommodation are in crisis. At the point of application, they do not necessarily have all of the documentation to hand. I wish to re-emphasise that my primary, first-instance concern is people who are legally and habitually resident in the State being wrongfully denied emergency accommodation and having no mechanism for appeal. The current situation is that they are assessed as being homeless. They are put in emergency accommodation and then a key worker or a local authority staff member works with them to provide the documentation to get the social housing support application in place or to provide the other forms of evidence that are there. The Minister has denied an appeal but what he has described with the review is not that dissimilar from the appeal except it is not founded in law. The applicant will get the decision to be reviewed by a superior decision maker. The difficulty is, because they are in crisis, whether they will have access to the necessary legal support, advocacy support or documentation in the time period. With respect, on the safety net, the Minister rightfully keeps saying he wants to ensure consistency yet when you read the section of the amendment it states that the local authority or housing authority "may" make a decision to provide that safety net. That means we will get inconsistencies in decision-making right across the local authorities, particularly at the early stages of this legislation as people grapple with what is in front of them. In regard to the "two nights" provision, what about the weekend, a bank holiday or if somebody gets the initial two nights from a Friday and the decision-maker in the local authority is not back to work until the Tuesday after a bank holiday? The Minister is prescribing this in legislation rather than in guidance, with the necessary flexibility. Since the Minister raised the social housing transfer protocol that was published last week - something for which many of us have campaigned for a long time - it does not apply to about half of the households who will need it, namely, people who are currently in receipt of HAP or RAS but are not on the principal social housing waiting list or on a HAP transfer list will not avail of this. It is something I urged the Minister's colleague, the Minister of State, Deputy John Cummins, to raise with him directly when we discussed it with him last week, to amend the circular to ensure every woman, or every woman and child or children, who desperately needs the social housing transfer protocol can get it, whether they are council list applicants or on the HAP or RAS transfer lists. Nothing the Minister said has convinced me of the merits of what is in front of us and on that basis, I am pushing the amendment. --- 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/2026-07-08/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-09-14T01:01:07+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-07-08