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

I move amendment No. 11:

“In page 6, between lines 6 and 7, to insert the following: “Amendment of section 19B of Principal Act

4.The Principal Act is amended in section 19B(3) by the insertion of “where such a payment is part of a combined payment, including tuition and materials to a third level educational institution as prescribed by way of regulation by the Minister” after “month”.”.”

The Minister will remember a powerful campaign by the Union of Students in Ireland, USI, earlier this year. It provoked a cross-party Opposition Bill to introduce a number of protections for student renters. That Bill, thankfully, was not opposed by Government and the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, was true to his word. He brought forward his own legislation in a timely fashion to deal with those and a number of other issues that were of concern to many in the House. That Government legislation passed unanimously.

One of the issues in the drafting of that legislation was that, because the Government wanted to act speedily and it had our support in that, there was a particular loophole included with respect to where a student enters into a new licence or tenancy for the purposes of student accommodation. While the general rule is that they should only have to pay a month’s rent in deposit, with the consent of the student, they can pay more. When we queried this with the Minister and the officials, it was explained that there was a genuine concern from the Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science that a certain class of international students who pre-arrive in the country via a package of education, tuition materials and accommodation would be prohibited from doing so if there was not some provision in the Bill. We accepted that. However, the drafting of such a provision was not technically possible within the short timeframe. Therefore, a looser provision was included in that legislation. We understood that the Minister and the Department were going to revisit in this Bill. I was surprised when I raised it previously with both the officials and the Minister at the outset of the passage of this legislation that we were told that it was not being considered in this Bill.

Many of us have spoken to USI over the course of the last number of months. There have been instances, thankfully few in terms of the number reported, where students who are under pressure to secure accommodation have been pressurised into “voluntarily” paying more than a month's rent and a month’s rent in advance in order to secure accommodation. Obviously, in all such cases, the right course of action for the students is to go to the Residential Tenancies Board, RTB, after they have signed the tenancy agreement. Then, they will have standing in the RTB. Both we and the students’ unions have urged them to do so. The difficulty is that because students are desperate to get the accommodation they may not feel fully empowered to do so.

It is disappointing that the Government did not address that loophole and tighten up the language. I am not in any way suggesting that my amendment, or a similar amendment by Deputy Nash, that originate from the USI are technically proficient. I am sure the Minister of State and his officials could do a much better job. However, the core principle is the provision included in the last Residential Tenancy (Amendment) Bill, which is specifically to allow students coming into the country buying that package to continue to do so, needs further amendment. I urge the Minister of State to at the very least to give us a commitment to reconsider this issue. It is not acceptable in a time of diminishing supply, and probably the worst student rental crisis in the history the State and certainly in recent decades, for any form of loophole to be there that could unfortunately be exploited by unscrupulous landlords who want to charge families more than a month’s rent and a month’s rent deposit on taking up the tenancy or the licence.

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