Evictions and Rent Hikes: Motion [Private Members]
Dail Éireann — 2026-05-19
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Eoin Ó Broin (SF), Dublin Mid-West

When the Minister made his announcement last summer about the intended changes to the regulation of the rental sector two things happened. The first is that every quarter since July there has been a dramatic increase in eviction notices. In July, August and September it was a 38% increase. In October, November and December it was 41%. In the most recent figures it was 51%. That is the direct consequence of the policy decisions the Minister and his colleagues in the Government have made. During that whole period rents continued to rise so the Minister knows what is going to happen when we get both the Daft and RTB data from 1 March. He knows we are going to be moving back into double-digit rental inflation, first in some cities and then State-wide. That means there will be thousands of additional people looking for rental accommodation at a time when the rate of rental inflation is going through the roof. We are back to 2014, 2015 and 2016. That is what the Minister has done. He is telling people he is doing that so at some distant point in future there may be supply they may be able to afford, but what we are trying to highlight to him, and what the RTB data and soon-to-be-published Daft.ie data will tell him is right now there are real-world consequences to the decisions he has made impacting upon thousands upon thousands of people. No doubt some of those people will get new tenancies but they will be pushed into ever-greater financial hardship. The ones who cannot get tenancies will be forced to move back home with their parents, forced to emigrate or forced to present for emergency homeless accommodation.
It is likely that the consequence of this will be that homeless presentations will continue to trend steadily upwards. The Minister is doing all that on a promise that we might get increased rental accommodation in the form of high-density, high-cost rental developments in very specific parts of the State. They will not be in the Minister’s county or in the counties of the majority of TDs. That strategy is not going to work. In the meantime, the decisions he is making are in real time punishing renters for his housing policy failures. All the while the Minister is not meeting his social housing targets. He can make all the comparisons he wants with the 1970s but we have twice the population now we had then and the level of social housing need is far greater. The State would need to double social housing output on its current level to come anywhere close to meeting the level of need. The housing targets the Minister is meeting the least are his affordable housing targets. He is so far off and the vast majority of the units still are not affordable and the private sector still is not delivering enough private homes for working people to buy, again because the Minister’s activation measures are not working or are not the right choices.
We have set out a set of alternatives. We did not expect the Minister to support it but if these trends continue and the number of people who are being harmed because of the policies he is implementing continues to grow, at what point will he say enough is enough? Will it be after six months, 12 months or two years? Until he accepts that, we will continue to highlight his errors and to put forward alternatives. That is why I commend this motion to the House.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-05-19/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-09-28T05:50:46+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-05-19