Dáil debates

Wednesday, 8 May 2019

Residential Tenancies (Amendment) (No. 2) Bill 2018: Report and Final Stages

 

7:05 pm

Photo of Eoghan MurphyEoghan Murphy (Dublin Bay South, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputy O' Sullivan for her amendment. As I said on Committee Stage, I wanted to do this. I wanted to have a rent register to provide rent transparency on individual properties. I had a very robust back and forth discussion with the Attorney General's office on this. The strong advice that came back was that I could not do this, that it would not be legally sound for me to pursue it. Therefore, what we will try to do by way of amendment No. 35 is to provide information at the street level to give people a better idea. Of course, if we go for the street level data, there is no point in producing that one month after the annual rent registration comes into effect, which is January of next year because not everyone will have registered in the first month. We need a 12 month period to allow the annual registration law to bed down. Then I will make a request of the RTB to give me street-level or area-level data or whatever makes most sense depending on the particular location, in order to provide a greater level of transparency. We have no transparency currently but the strong advice I received is that we cannot do it at individual property level. That is why I cannot accept the Deputy's amendment. However, amendments Nos. 33 to 35 get us very close to where we want to be, in tandem with the annual registration of rents, which will come into force on the passing of this Bill.

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