Thomas Pringle (Donegal, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am grateful for the opportunity to speak on the Residential Tenancies (Tenants' Rights) Bill. I support the Bill in its attempt to address some of the issues facing renters today, particularly in its effort to address the key areas of security of tenure, rents, deposits and quality of accommodation. These are very important issues that are in urgent need of addressing. The Government cannot go on burying its head in the sand and pretending these problems no longer exist. The Bill does a good job in addressing some of these important issues. However, I believe there are some areas that could be looked at further.

While I welcome and support the fact that the Bill addresses security of tenure, in that it would restrict the circumstances in which a landlord can terminate a tenancy, I believe there is scope to provide a mechanism whereby the grounds for evictions are removed with a mediation process in place. This would allow for assistance in cases of arrears that looks to help landlords with management and recovery while avoiding evictions. I believe this would benefit landlords and tenants.

It is vital that in a country such as Ireland, where increasing numbers of families are renters, quality of life be taken into legislative consideration. I commend the Bill as it takes this into account. One of the most distressing things a public representative faces is meeting families who have been evicted through the so-called sale of houses. Trying to get accommodation sorted for families in the current climate is impossible. While there may have been a time when renting was the domain of students and transient workers, this is no longer the reality. The pandemic had forced us all to spend more time than ever in our homes and the importance of quality of life within the home has been highlighted. We need to pull current rental rules into the 21st century and give our renters the quality of life they deserve.

I do not think anyone in the Chamber would disagree that this country is experiencing a huge rental crisis. We need only to have looked outside last week to see just how many this housing crisis is affecting. In my constituency of Donegal, I have been contacted by many students, excited to begin or to return to college, who are unable to secure any type of accommodation and are being forced to reconsider their college places. This should never be the case and we should all feel ashamed that we have forced our youth into this situation.

There is an urgent need for cost-rental homes. There are upwards of 300,000 rental homes in Ireland. Housing For All, which the Government likes to pretend does something real and substantial in addressing this issue, has provided for only 2,000 cost-rental homes. The Government likes to accuse the Opposition of criticising without offering any solution. I would like to offer a solution in the Vienna model, which is internationally utilised and provides a well-endorsed and successful working model for cost rental. This model would provide State-owned accommodation that functions to deliver affordable rental accommodation for low to middle income households. It would also assist in suppressing rent inflation. It operates in a way that reinvests any surplus money from rents in the system, in comparison with the proposed model under Housing for All which only leaves room for developers to profit. We need far more cost-rental units than the measly 2,000 the Government has suggested and they need to operate on a not-for-profit basis.

In order to further address these issues effectively, we need to empower our local authorities to oversee the planning, acquisition, registration, inspection and certification process of builds. If we did this, there would not be a need for the Land Development Agency. The Building Control Act is a hybrid of private and public that has allowed issues such as we currently see in Donegal and Mayo with mica to arise. It is not enough that the Government provides 100% redress to those affected by deleterious materials in concrete blocks. There is scope and opportunity to empower local authorities properly to provide new and improved mechanisms to ensure homeowners are protected. We would not even need new and improved mechanisms if we just enforced the law that is already in place. It is sad that we do not have enforcement to ensure blocks are manufactured to the proper standards. We have a self-certification system in Ireland that just does not work. I believe it was designed not to work to facilitate the manufacturers and the Construction Industry Federation to make massive profits, as they have done. We see that homeowners are being left to carry the can and this is wrong. This is something the Government should consider if it is serious about not only addressing the mica issue but ensuring that this does not happen again, which is vital.

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