Ruth Coppinger (Dublin West, Anti-Austerity Alliance) | Oireachtas source

The Minister said he could not but now he can. What seems to be the case is that he can intervene in the rental market as long as he still guarantees profiteering for the landlords.

The Minister included Dublin and Cork, and it is now probably being extended to a few other areas. We challenge his criterion of 7% in a number of our amendments. Where did the arbitrary figure of 7% come from? Why is it that a person's rent has to be going up by 7% and be above the national average? The Minister is saying that everybody in, say, Tipperary or elsewhere, who has not reached that point should have to come to the same amount of suffering as tenants in Dublin and Cork. He is saying we should let them suffer equally and have the same rent increases. We should be knocking this on the head. No rent increases should be allowed.

I will go through some of the amendments quickly. There are a lot of them. The first is the Minister's one about the timeframe. He has to say what he is going to do about this because he is now talking about the end of February so landlords would potentially have two months in all of those locations to put their rents up quickly to avoid coming under the RTB scrutiny and going into one of the rent pressure zones. The Minister said earlier that by the end of February he would come back and report on whether these other locations would go into rent pressure zones. He has indicated a two month gap, meaning that landlords will want to increase rent. In case the Minister thinks I am imagining this there is a tenant in my area whose rent was subject to a 28% review in November. This was done by the vulture fund in Tyrellstown. The Minister claims to have clipped its wings but he has done nothing of the sort. It is now resorting to rent increases to get people out. The Minister will not backdate this Bill to protect that person but when queried about it the property agent said it had to do it because it would be barred from putting the rents up for two years. These people look very closely at any legislation and decisions made in here. They will consider ways to get the maximum rent before possibly being included in one of the rent pressure zones. That makes it all the more unforgivable that the Minister did not include them in the first place and get this passed quickly. This Bill could have been dealt with in the same way as the banking legislation and done by midnight tonight if the Minister was serious about tackling rent increases.

The Minister says he will oppose our amendment No. 54 but is it crystal clear that if somebody increases the rent by 4% and a new tenant moves in it cannot go up again?

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