Pat Casey (Wicklow, Fianna Fail)
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I will be brief. I welcome Deputy O'Sullivan and her Bill, as well as Deputy Barry and his Bill. My party also has a Bill on this issue, as does Sinn Féin, and the Government has its Bill on the way too. There is a fair emphasis to try to resolve this issue regarding landlords and tenants.

We had a fairly productive meeting with the Minister in private session of this committee last week. We discussed the proposed amendments that we are all prepared to put into that Bill. There is a need to find a balance between landlords and tenants and a compromise position that facilitates both. We need landlords and tenants. We need to keep them both there. As has been said, the lack of detailed data available to us to make the correct decisions is disappointing. The RTB says it has 307,000 private rental tenancies registered. What percentage are we talking about in respect of evictions? If we had that information in front of us, we could probably make more concrete, accurate decisions.

The last thing we want to do is have an impact on the market that makes the situation worse. The RTB is already telling us that 6,000 private rental tenancies exited the market last year. We cannot sustain that. In the absence of the delivery of housing, we are depending on the rental market. We can ask ourselves as society where we want to go. Do we want to move away from the traditional landlords that Ireland has always had? Everyone has pointed out that 70% of landlords in Ireland own less than one property while 86% have two or three more. We have only 14% commercial landlords as we would consider them. It seems to be a lot easier to bring in legislation around the commercial landlords. For our traditional landlords, there is great emotion attached to it. It is their one-off property that they have bought, whether as an investment or because they were caught at the crash, and they feel entitled to do what they want with it. They feel that if they want to sell it, they should be entitled to do so. That does not apply to the commercial landlords because they are completely different. As the rental sector is becoming more important because people are deciding to rent moving forward, we need to make sure that the decisions we make here do not have an adverse effect on the market or further exacerbate the situation we are in.

I agree with a lot of what Deputy Jan O'Sullivan is proposing in her Bill. I have no issue around the proposals in the area of deposits. I fully agree with her on the rent pressure zones, RPZs. I have said it from day 1. It would have been easier to put the whole country in and have regulation on how areas would get out. In my constituency it is having a huge impact. I have one local electoral area, LEA, that is very rural but that contains a huge urban area in Blessington, right beside Tallaght. It will never qualify as a rent pressure zone. Arklow sits right beside Wicklow, Bray and Greystones, which are in it. I know there are landlords abusing the system and shoving rents up because they are in fear that they will be in an RPZ moving forward. I do not have many direct questions. I just feel we need to be very careful in what we decide. Everybody in this room has the intention of finding the correct balance for the tenant and the landlord. We need to keep the 86% of landlords there while we ramp up the delivery of social housing in the long term.