Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

It is important to emphasise the two single biggest policy criticisms we have heard from the landlords' representative organisations today. The differential treatment of landlords with respect to rent regulation and the differential treatment of landlords with respect to taxation are both policies of the good Senator's party that we have long opposed and will continue to oppose.

I emphasise Mr. Davitt's point around data because we do not know what the market rent is today. He is right that we know what the asking rent is for a very small number of properties at the top end. Two years ago, the RTB stopped giving us the equivalised actual market rent for new and existing rental properties by property type and location. The sooner we get to that the better because this conversation will be better informed. It is also regrettable we have no registration data for 2021 or 2022. I am conscious the old data set was not great. The sooner we get those two things better. That is not a criticism of the RTB and probably more one of the Government for not resourcing it. If we had those, this conversation would be much better.

I agree with Mr. Allen that energy-efficiency retrofit upgrades should be tax-deductible. It is crazy they are not because there is no incentive for a landlord to upgrade the energy efficiency of our rental stock. We all know it has some of the lowest levels of energy efficiency and tenants do not have the capacity. It is something I support strongly and I am glad Mr. Allen raised it.

My question for Ms O'Reilly is twofold and she should feel free, in the time she has, to answer the other questions she did not get a chance to answer. Landlords have, again completely legitimately from their point of view, called for existing landlords to be able reset the rent to up to the asking price, per the market in that area, where a tenant moves out. In Ms O'Reilly's view, representing the cohort of tenants she represents, what would be the impact of that, especially in high-demand areas like Dublin and the other cities? Ms O'Reilly wanted to respond to a couple of other members' questions and I want to give her a couple of minutes to do that and if I have some more time I will put a couple more questions to others.