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

As the Minister of State knows, I am a very reasonable person. In fact, the Tánaiste has taken to extolling the virtues of my reasonableness at Leaders' Questions on several occasions recently. However, the Minister of State's response to the text of the Bill tests my reasonableness. He said it would have an enormous adverse impact on supply. There is nothing in this Bill that would have any adverse impact on supply. All I have done is framed legislation that would give the Minister the power, by way of regulations, to design the regime. We deliberately left it as open and as flexible as possible to avoid the very things he said. For the sake of clarity, if I were asked how to design the regulations, I would suggest that a rolling four-year inspection regime, with 25% of properties inspected each year, would be sensible. There would also be a four-year lead-in, which would mean that the actual legal requirement would only kick in after the first four-year cycle. This would be the only way one would do it. Of course I am open to discussion on whether that is four, five or six years, but that is the way I would do it.

The Minister of State also said that a consequence of the Bill would include having much needed rental stock left empty. That is simply not the case. Nobody is going to design a regime where upon first inspection, if there are issues, particularly minor issues, a tenant who is in situwould be forced out. That makes no sense. Only the most narrow-minded reading of the way in which these regulations could be implemented would conclude that.

The Minister of State also said that this proposal would place high demands on local authorities, which I do not agree with at all. He has quoted the figure of 50,000 inspections in 2022. On the basis of the current number of registered tenancies - we only have 2021 data - some 70,000 inspections would need to be carried out per year. According to the NOAC data, only about 17% of inspections require a second or third inspection. That would mean if there were a minimum of 70,000 inspections each year over four years, and if the percentage was the same as NOAC's - we assume it would be lower because more properties would be inspected, including more compliant properties - it would push the annual inspection figure up to 80,000. I have no idea where the Minister of State got the figure of 300,000. I presume officials were asked to give the most extreme case as to why the Bill is difficult. We do not even have 300,000 rental tenancies registered with the RTB as of 2021.

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