Darragh O'Brien (Dublin Fingal, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I have met cost rental tenants, single individuals, who have rented cost rental properties on their own. This mechanism is not brought in as a cost reduction measure for the AHB partners or indeed the LDA partners. The Deputy will have a view on that. I will just say it is not. As the Deputy has outlined already, at different times of their lives, people may want to share. Right now, the situation is that if a single person wants to share with another single person, and they are not a family unit, they cannot do that. It gives that other person the same security and security of tenure. What we are looking at here is mainly for singles. I do not envisage a situation of two family groups, for argument's sake, such as a couple and another couple, in that instance. The Deputy will be at the Oireachtas joint committee tomorrow, where this can be teased out further. The income threshold for somebody who is sharing, this multi-occupancy tenancy, has not been decided upon yet. It will be set out within the regulations. I assure the Deputy that this is really to respond to our delivery partners but also, very importantly, prospective tenants who want to share and who are not family units. We will work around the transfer piece that I mentioned already, how one would transfer out of one property and into another.

See this speech in context