Christopher O'Sullivan (Cork South-West, Fianna Fail)
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I move: "That the Bill be now read a Second Time."

I am grateful to all Deputies and to everybody behind the scenes for facilitating the debate today on this urgent legislation in Dáil Éireann. I will be sharing Government time with Minister of State, Deputy Cummins.

The Residential Tenancies (Amendment) Bill 2025 will amend the Residential Tenancies Acts 2004 to 2024 to extend and expand the operation of rent pressures zones, RPZs, to cover the entire country until 28 February 2026. This Bill provides an interim measure to quickly protect all tenants from high rent increases in anticipation of the broader changes announced last week and planned to take effect in March. For all new tenancies created on or after 1 March 2026, stronger tenancy protections will apply for tenants and a national rent control system will apply.

As Members know, on 10 June 2025, the Government approved policy measures to provide for the enhancement of rent controls and tenancy protections from 1 March 2026. Last week, the Government also approved, as an interim measure, the provision of a two-month extension of RPZs and the deeming of all areas of the country as an RPZ from the day after the passing of this Bill until 28 February 2026. Yesterday, the Government approved the publication of this Bill to implement this measure. We are moving fast because renters need protection.

From the day after the passing of this Bill, with the co-operation of both Houses of the Oireachtas and enactment by President Higgins, the current RPZ rent increase restriction will apply throughout the country. No rent increase can exceed 2% per annum pro rata or, if lower, the rate of inflation as measured by the harmonised index of consumer prices, HICP, unless certain exemptions apply. This is an immediate and concrete protection against high rent inflation.

Rent increases outside of RPZs are now at a level where the application of the rent increase restriction can be justified to apply nationally. We want to provide certainty, clarity and stability for the rental sector. The new policy measures announced last week to apply from next March aim to boost investment in the supply of homes. A new national rental control will come into effect on 1 March 2026, immediately following the expiration of the RPZs. Legislation will be introduced later this year to give effect to the new measures announced for March. The impending changes to rent controls have been informed by the findings of the Housing Agency review of RPZs, and potential policy options, and its preferred recommendation to modify the operation of the existing RPZ rent controls.

We aim to operate a national rent control to ensure that any rent increases across the country will be restricted in line with inflation, with limited exceptions. To protect tenants in times of high inflation, we will retain the cap of permissible rent inflation at 2% per annum pro rata, with limited exceptions. We will allow rents for new tenancies created such as first-time tenancy between parties, on or after 1 March 2026 to be set at market value, but in return for far greater security of tenancies for tenants, through six-year tenancies of minimum duration with smaller landlords, that is, landlords with three or fewer tenancies. No-fault evictions will be restricted to smaller landlords and outlawed for larger landlords. The move to a national rent control recognises the reality that tenants throughout the entire country face difficulty in paying their rent. We will continue in March to restrict the rent increases in line with inflation, but linked to CPI and not HICP, and retain that 2% cap.

The Government wants to be clear that at this time, we recognise rents are very high. We also want to be clear that we simply need new investment in rental accommodation, particularly apartments for rent, and that is why we are allowing the rents for new apartments to be linked to CPI, even when inflation exceeds 2%. From 1 March 2026, landlords will be allowed to reset rent for new tenancies, that is, first-time tenancies created between parties, and between future tenancies. However, resetting of rents will not be allowed following a no-fault eviction. Rent resetting will only be allowed where a tenant leaves a tenancy of their own volition or has breached their tenant obligations or the dwelling is no longer suitable to the accommodation needs of the tenant household.

Resetting of rents will not be allowed during any tenancy created on or before 28 February 2026, due to the uncertainty this would cause with existing tenancies.

To counter the risk of economic evictions, the Government put the sector on notice last week, on 10 June, that from 1 March 2026, stronger tenant protections will apply for new tenancies, that is, first time tenancies between parties. A larger landlord with four or more tenancies cannot end a tenancy created on or after 1 March 2026 via a no-fault eviction. The tenancy will be for an unlimited duration after its first six months without a valid notice of termination having been served. A smaller landlord with three or fewer tenancies will be able to end a tenancy created on or after 1 March 2026 via a no-fault eviction, only at the end of each six-year period that follows or, in very limited circumstances, at any time. It is worth noting that no-fault evictions can occur in line with the strictly limited grounds for termination under the Residential Tenancies Acts. The lawful use of these grounds will continue to apply for smaller landlords only from 1 March 2026. Strict termination procedures apply and the Residential Tenancies Board is available to resolve any dispute that might arise. The provision for a six-year tenancy of minimum duration from next March is a real leap forward for tenant protections in return for allowing landlords to reset rents. These changes will have a significant impact for our rental sector, making much-needed investment more attractive while strengthening the protections and providing greater certainty for renters. I accept there is a very fine balance to be struck here in our efforts. We aim to attract investment, but we know that tenants deserve and need fair treatment. We aim for tenancy protections that best suit tenants and landlords.

This is just one strand of a suite of measures, including planning extensions, planning exemptions and a tranche of further key decisions this week and in the coming weeks from the Government and the Minister, Deputy James Browne. This Bill, and the forthcoming legislation to operate from March 2026, represent key progress. We aim to strike a balance and bring clarity and certainty. Without all of these measures, we cannot ramp up the supply needed. The Government is determined and ambitious to get this right. RPZs are due to expire at the end of this year. If we do nothing, all rents go back to market. The Government is not allowing that to happen. For years, the operation of RPZs has had to be extended, time and again. This has created a sense of uncertainty. We are now moving to a permanent national rent control to provide certainty for tenants, landlords and investors across the country.

As we look to the future of our rental sector, it is clear that the status quois not optimal, either for renters or for those providing much-needed homes. This Bill, and the further legislation to follow, represent a decisive step forward in delivering real, practical and long-term protections. Nowhere is this more relevant than in my constituency of Cork South-West. At the moment only one third of the constituency is covered by the protections that renters can get from rent pressure zones. In the other two thirds, including my home town of Clonakilty, Skibbereen and Bantry, significant towns within the constituency, renters are not covered by these protections. They are exposed to large hikes in rent after certain periods. That is not sustainable and cannot continue. This legislation brings in a greater level of protection and certainty for these renters. I know that for renters across my constituency and the country who will now be covered by these RPZs, this will come as a great sigh of relief. The future legislation to follow will also bring further protections and strengthen protections for tenants, along with legislation that will encourage investment in apartments and the provision of housing. This is very welcome. I implore Deputies across the House to get behind this legislation. It is needed for the protection of renters, for future protection and, eventually, to incentivise investment in delivery of apartments and houses in this country. That is the ultimate solution to reducing rents.

John Cummins (Waterford, Fine Gael)
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I am pleased to speak today on this very important Bill. The two-month extension to the operation of all existing RPZs, and the deeming of all remaining areas of the country to become RPZs from the day after the passing of this Bill until 28 February 2026, are critical to quickly protect all tenants from high rent increases in anticipation of the broader changes announced last week and planned to take effect next March.

As the Minister of State, Deputy O'Sullivan, outlined, the new policy measures from March aim to boost investment in the supply of homes while protecting renters. The Government is fully committed to working with all stakeholders to deliver social, affordable and cost-rental homes at scale and to continue accelerating housing supply across all tenures including rental. This is demonstrated by the record level of investment being provided for the delivery of housing in 2025, with overall capital funding now available of almost €6.8 billion. This provision includes the additional capital funding for 2025, which was recently agreed by the Government, namely, €450 million to support the delivery of 3,000 additional social, affordable and cost-rental homes in the period 2025 to 2027 and €265 million to allow for a significant programme of acquisitions in 2025 for priority categories of need. The capital provision for 2025 is supplemented by a further €1.65 billion in current funding to address housing need. Increasing the supply of new homes is key to addressing many of the challenges in the housing market. The Government is committed to delivering more homes, more quickly, for more people to build on the increases we see in the quarter 1 delivery figures so far this year. The new programme for Government aims to ramp up supply further and deliver 300,000 new homes between now and the end of 2030.

The Government continues to review and modernise the planning system and has prioritised the implementation of the Planning and Development Act 2024 to support increased supply across all tenures of housing. This is a key priority of mine as Minister of State with responsibility for planning. This Act represents the most comprehensive review of planning since 2000 and will reform and streamline the planning process, reducing delays in housing and strategic infrastructure projects. The urban development zone, or UDZ, process under Part 22 of the Planning and Development Act 2024 aims to provide for an updated and more flexible approach to the planning and delivery of areas with significant potential for large-scale development and the associated necessary infrastructure. This element has been commenced by the Minister, Deputy Browne, and will be an important part of the variation process which local authorities will undertake shortly.

Given that there are a significant number of planning permissions for housing that are due to expire shortly, the Government is now bringing forward the Planning and Development (Amendment) Bill 2025 to deal with expiring permissions and to encourage activation of housing. This will allow holders of permission for housing development with less than two years left on the permission and have not yet commenced to apply for an extension of up to three years. The Bill will also allow for the provisions of section 180 of the Planning and Development Act 2024 to retrospectively apply to permissions that have already been through the judicial review process or are currently in judicial review and are subsequently permitted. In other words, this will allow for the duration of the judicial review period to not be counted as part of the effective life of the planning permission, avoiding a situation whereby in the past, planning permissions have expired due to delays caused by the judicial review process. This legislation, which we expect to have passed by the summer recess, could protect permissions for upwards of 20,000 housing units from expiry. The Government wants to see shovels in the ground and homes built, and I am sure the Opposition will agree with that. Developers will need to step up and benefit from the extensions that we are bringing forward in this respect.

Returning to the Bill, the upcoming changes to rent controls and tenancy protection feed into a broader suite of measures to bring on housing supply. In return and to balance that, there have to be protections for tenants in that respect. We expect to see progress on this through both Houses of the Oireachtas this week. I certainly hope the officials' briefing to the joint Oireachtas committee, which I understand took place yesterday, was helpful.

Given the potential risk of high rent increases for tenants outside of RPZs who have not had their rent reviewed in the last 24 months, the intention is to seek the early signing of this Bill into law by the President. It is important for all tenants to be protected as soon as possible under the current rent increase restrictions applying in RPZ areas. This Bill provides the necessary protections for all tenants from the day after the passing of this legislation until 28 February 2026. Currently, 17% of tenancies are located outside RPZ areas.

Introducing stronger protections for tenants will not work without a concerted effort in enforcement. The Programme for Government: Securing Ireland's Future, published on 23 January 2025, commits to continuing Government support for renters and landlords. This includes measures to protect renters and landlords from abusive practices by enhancing the enforcement powers of the Residential Tenancies Board. As highlighted in the RTB director’s quarterly update for the first quarter of 2025, the RTB’s ongoing compliance and enforcement campaign is focusing significant resources on several in-depth investigations into serious, deliberate and repeated breaches of rental law. The ongoing RPZ compliance campaign, launched by the RTB last October following the publication of the inaugural property level analysis, has targeted 16,052 tenancies where rent increased by more than 2%. As a result, €70,911 in overpaid rent has been returned to tenants following 114 compliance interventions. This is positive news for tenants and sends out a clear message that those who deliberately breach RPZ legislation will be challenged. Last month, 36 sanctions were published, resulting in €102,490 in monetary sanctions being issued for serious breaches of rental law, and 105 formal RTB investigations are under way.

I will briefly outline the provisions of this Bill, which contains five sections. Sections 1 and 5 contain standard provisions. Section 1 defines the "Principal Act" to mean the Residential Tenancies Act 2004. Section 5 provides for the Short Title, commencement, collective citation and construction of the Bill.

Section 2 amends section 20, frequency with which rent review may occur, of the Principal Act to provide for the termination of biannual rent reviews outside RPZs, and the entire country will become an RPZ from the day after the passing of the Bill.

Section 3 amends section 24, areas deemed to be rent pressure zones, of the Principal Act. Section 3(a) provides for a two-month extension until 28 February 2026 to the operation of the RPZs in the administrative areas of Cork City Council, Dublin City Council, Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council, Fingal County Council and South Dublin County Council, which were deemed to be RPZs under section 24B(1) of the Principal Act. Section 3(b) provides for a two-month extension until 28 February 2026 to the operation of the RPZ in the local electoral area of Drogheda Rural, which was deemed to be an RPZ under section 24B(2) of the Principal Act. Section 3(c) provides, through a new section 24B(3), for the deeming of any area not already an RPZ to become an RPZ from the day after the passing of this Bill until 28 February 2026.

Section 4 amends section 8(2) of the Residential Tenancies (Amendment) Act 2019 to provide for a two-month extension until 28 February 2026 to the operation of existing RPZs designated under section 24A(5) of the Principal Act.

The Bill strikes a balance and takes into account the legal advices of the Attorney General. It will safeguard tenants from high rent inflation during the period to next March. This Bill is an interim measure before we bring forward wider changes announced by the Government last week. I thank all the Deputies for participating in this legislative process in advance of what I referred to occurring. I am sure plenty of points will be made, but I assure the House that all efforts of the Government are about striking the balance between protecting renters and encouraging new investment in the private market. This is an interim measure to allow us to bring all the areas not currently covered by RPZs within the legislation. It is a positive measure that we hope the Opposition will support.

Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein)
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What an utter shambles. In my entire time in Dáil Éireann, I have never witnessed a more haphazard, ramshackle, back-of-the-envelope process for putting in place widespread reforms that are going to impact tens of thousands of people. While I understand Ministers and Ministers of State have to come here and defend this farce, privately they must be absolutely reeling. The credibility of the Government's housing policy has once again been exposed as an absolute sham. Only five months into the job, the Minister's own credibility has been badly damaged. This is not just my view. Listen to what the industry, media and commentators are saying. In fact, some of the Minister's own backbenchers were being quoted in the newspapers last weekend. I have to say this is an incredibly sorry tale.

With the greatest of respect to the Minister of State, Deputy Christopher O'Sullivan, speaking in defence of the hard-pressed renters in County Cork, the failure of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael since 2020 to do anything to protect the renters he represents has seen their rents increase by a staggering 60%. We are now looking at new rents in the Minister of State's county being €7,270 more expensive per year now than when the parties formed a coalition. I do not think renters in County Cork, especially outside the RPZs, will be thanking them for their inaction over all these years. As each day has unfolded since the leaks began the weekend before last, we have seen confusion, consternation, contradiction and widespread fear and anxiety among the tens of thousands of renters across this State.

When the Minister launched the policy last Tuesday, it was clear from the words coming out of his mouth and in print in his press release that the ability of landlords to reset rents to the full market level would apply to all tenancies from March 2026. When he was exposed on the floor of the Dáil the Taoiseach was left reeling from the Minister's incompetence and only then did he change the plan. Likewise, there was no mention of students when he launched these proposals on 10 June. There was no mention from his officials during the technical briefing given to the media. Again, it was only when it was highlighted that students would be some of the first and worst hit that the Minister scrambled around to fix the issue. He cannot even agree with his own party colleague, the Minister, Deputy James Lawless, on what level of additional protections may or may not be given to students. This shows that the Minister does not understand the legislation. He signed up to a package without any consideration of its impact on the vast majority of renters, leaving his backbenchers and having to defend what is utterly indefensible.

Let us look at the package as a whole because today's Bill, which I will come to shortly, is only part of a wider package. Let us call it by its name. It is the Fianna Fáil rent hike Bill. This is Micheál Martin, who initiated this process and pulls the strings of his Minister, jacking up the rents for tens of thousands of hard-pressed renters from March 2026 onwards. What is being done is not constructing a careful balance between landlords and tenants or introducing a comprehensive, State-wide rent protection regime. Rather, the rent pressure zone legislation introduced in 2016 is being dismantled over time. These were protections that were incredibly weak in the first place. Nobody will believe any attempt to present this as anything else. Universally, almost all the coverage, from journalists, commentators and industry, has accepted the simple, central fact of this proposal, which is that it is going to result in rent increases, in many cases at a more accelerated rate than would have otherwise happened. It appears that Fianna Fáil's solution to rising rents is to keep those rents rising.

Worse than that, in respect of new rental stock, from the start of next year, the Government is going to peg annual rent reviews to inflation, which will drag overall new rents up even faster. Market rent resets for new tenants in first-time tenancies will accelerate at an even greater rate. This is being done on the promise of increased institutional investment in high-end, high-density, private rental sector investment. That investment will not be delivered in Cork, and certainly not in west Cork. It will not be delivered in the constituencies of the Minister or the Minister of State.

John Cummins (Waterford, Fine Gael)
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Why not?

Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein)
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In the best-case scenario, all this will do is create a modest increase in the levels of institutional investment in high-end, high-cost, private rental cost developments in the Google quarter, Sandyford and other high-income areas. Everyone else will be left behind. The industry reaction to this has ranged from the lukewarm to the hostile because the Government could not even get that bit right. The consequence is that renters everywhere will pay a cost. They will not get the supply dividend the Minster is alleging.

James Browne (Wexford, Fianna Fail)
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How do you know?

Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein)
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I have heard the Minister and the Taoiseach say over and over again that they are going to protect all existing renters. Some 80% of current renters are in tenancies of six years or less. Long-term renters are in the minority. That is becoming increasingly evident through the constant levels of eviction notices. The idea that somehow existing renters are protected is simply not true.

While there is no doubt the security of tenure changes will benefit a small numbers of renters, the Government is creating an even more complex set of arrangements that are more difficult to understand and more readily available for rogue landlords to exploit or semi-professional, accidental landlords to misunderstand and make mistakes. That will lead to more disputes at the Residential Tenancies Board, which cannot even handle the current level of cases it has. As a consequence, more problems will arise. To make matters worse, what landlord in possession of a vacant property between now and next March is going to re-let it? This will suck out those properties, which will constrain supply even further and make matters worse in the short term.

With regard to the legislation, we have always argued that rent regulation should apply to all renters of all types in all counties. Extending the RPZs should have been done at the start. The Minister came into the Chamber and said that he is introducing this to protect renters when it was never even his intention to do so. It was always clear-----

James Browne (Wexford, Fianna Fail)
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That is not true. It is in the memo.

Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein)
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The Minister should go and talk to the journalists who raised these questions with his officials at the technical briefing. This was going to be in the legislation later this year.

While the RPZs should have always applied to all renters back in 2016, no one should be facing rent increases right now. We need rent increases banned for an emergency period of three years for those renters paying the highest rents in the history of the State. The amendments I will table later, which we will push to a vote, would do exactly that. They would protect renters who are already paying rip-off rents from any form of rent increase at all. That is what a party which wants to protect renters should be doing, along with putting in place a credible plan to increase investment in the delivery of social, affordable and private for-purchase homes.

The Minister also needs to clarify the impact of this legislation on people currently engaging in short-term letting, in many cases in rural countryside areas. This practice is valuable to the tourism economy. They understood that this matter was going to be dealt with by the process of the register legislation and the accompanying planning regulations from the Minister, Deputy Burke. The day after this Bill comes into effect, however, the short-term letting regulations introduced by the former Minister, Eoghan Murphy, will apply across the board. The Minister owes those people an explanation as to the implications of this and what his instructions to local authorities will be.

To be clear, Sinn Féin is not opposing this Bill. What is in front of us will not protect renters because in a short matter of months, the Minister will bring forward legislation that will rip the heart out of the rent pressure zones. Over a period of time, many of the people the Government is promising protection today will eventually have their rents set to full market rent. All of the affordability gains of the near decade of rent pressure zones will be wiped away. That is what the Government is doing. It is part of a much bigger package, one that is an assault on renters at a time when the Government is also considering reducing design standards. Not only will renters be paying more rent, they will be living in smaller, darker and less adequate apartments in the future. The big consequence of Fianna Fáil's rent-hike Bill is that renters will be the losers once again. This Bill means higher rents with no guarantee of increased supply.

What is clear today, after two weeks of chaos and confusion, is that Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael's housing policy has been exposed for the disaster that it is. The Minister's handling of this has been greatly damaged. That is why, in the context of the protest yesterday, the protest in Cork on Saturday and in the weeks ahead, thousands of people will march in opposition to what the Government is doing to renters. It is ripping them off and forcing them to pay higher rents. We will not stand for it.

Thomas Gould (Cork North-Central, Sinn Fein)
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The Minister is determined to make this as confusing as possible. He is forcing out jargon and spin instead of solutions. He talks about RPZs, STRs and every acronym under the sun. Renters do not want that. They are looking for security, support and affordability. It is not rocket science. Unfortunately, the Government, specifically the Minister as the person with responsibility in this area, are turning it into rocket science. The Land League was established 200 years ago to protect and stand up for renters. We now have the likes of the Community Action Tenants' Union, CATU, on the front line standing up for renters because someone needs to stand up for them. That is what Sinn Féin, Raise the Roof and the Opposition are doing because this Government is not standing up for renters.

To give the Minister a feel of what it is like to be a renter today, a lady contacted me who is paying €1,500 rent per month. She has a 22-year-old daughter in her final year of college and a 16-year-old son in transition year who will be going into fifth year in September. She is terrified because she does not know when a rent increase or eviction notice will come. What a way for a mother, who has done everything right, to live her life. She does not qualify to get on the social housing list and is not entitled to HAP because she earns too much money. She works hard and got an education. Despite her doing everything right, the Minister and the Government have excluded her and put her under pressure. She lives in fear as a renter. It is a desperate situation for all renters. This lady is terrified of what will come down the road. Sinn Féin will propose amendments tonight that will ensure she does not receive a rent increase. The amendments would give her security and allow her to focus on her children, her job and on herself. Can she not be entitled to focus on herself and have some peace of mind? I am not sure whether the Minister and Ministers of State understand this fully. There are enough of them in the Government. Surely some of them understand what renters are going through. If they do not, why do they not reach out to renters to ask them? Whoever is providing the advice is giving the wrong advice for renters. This Government would sooner go to big pension funds, vulture funds and investment companies to get advice when it should be going to ordinary people and renters.

One section of the community is pitted against the other as a result of this. Some people feel that others are entitled to social housing and HAP and are receiving college education while they are working all the hours God sends. The failure in this regard lies at the Government’s feet. Its members are the people responsible.

I want to see people given an opportunity to have the best quality of life they can have. The Minister's so-called protections are a joke. The Government is not giving any security to college students, doctors, those getting an education or apprentices. When they get their qualifications, they will get that security by going to Cork, Shannon or Dublin airports and getting on a plane to America, Canada, New Zealand or Australia. There are 100,000 people in Australia who were born in Ireland. The Government has exported and sent these people out of our country as a consequence of all its different failures in housing, cost of living and looking after young people. For a young person, it is a choice between that or staying in the box bedroom of their parents’ home until they are 30 or 40 years old. I know a lad who worked in Leinster House for ten years and emigrated to Australia last year because he could not earn enough working in Leinster House to get a mortgage.

His future is in Australia. The night before he left he said, “My only hope of being able to buy a house in Ireland is if there is another crash or recession. Otherwise, I will never be home again”. That is what this Government is giving renters.

Louise O'Reilly (Dublin Fingal West, Sinn Fein)
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It sometimes strikes me that if it was not for incompetence, there would be no competence at all with this Government. There are 15,500 people homeless. Of those, 5,000 are children. That is evidence for anyone with eyes to see that the Government’s policy is failing. They do not need us to tell them - Government members should be able to see that for themselves. I am sure they do not go home in the evening when they have finished work and think they are proud of those homeless figures. I am sure that when they reflect, they are ashamed. I hope they are. I hope that sometimes they have time in their day to think about kids who are growing up in emergency accommodation who will find themselves ostracised in school because they cannot have people over for sleepovers and they cannot have a normal life. Despite the Government’s best efforts to normalise this housing crisis people still have a memory of what it was like before they destroyed it. People still have some residual memory of what it is like for a young person to be able to aspire to secure accommodation, be it rented or accommodation they can purchase.

Yesterday, there were thousands of people outside this building protesting about homelessness. One of them was my father. Fifty-six years ago, he was a member of the Dublin Housing Action Committee. That was a group of people who came together to fight for the rights of people to decent and secure housing. He has said to me a few times that he did not think he would have to be back on the streets again, but that is exactly where he has to be. That is where people will be next Saturday in Cork at the National Monument at 2 p.m. because they want the Government to know they are angry. They also, and this is really important, need the Government to understand that as hard as it might try to normalise children growing up in hotels people will not allow that. The Government tries very hard to make people accept that on the last Friday of every month, it rambles out and announces the latest homelessness figures. That was not a feature when I was growing up or when the Leas-Cheann Comhairle was growing up. We know that is not normal at all. The Government can try but it will not succeed because people remember what it was like to have a functioning housing market.

In my constituency of Dublin Fingal West the latest Daft report tells us rents have gone up by 7.2%, in case the Ministers do not know, in a rent pressure zone. The average rent is now €2,371. The Government built affordable houses - you would laugh if it was not so serious - in my constituency that cost over €500,000 each. When replying, the Minister might tell me who exactly is affording that? When he was labelling those houses as being affordable, what kind of income did he have in mind? What kind of people does he think are going to be able to afford that accommodation?

Shortly before the election, I met a family. They had been evicted from their accommodation in Swords and were living with her family in Lusk. It was massively overcrowded. Everyone was squeezed into one bedroom. They have good jobs. These are normal jobs. They are not big-money jobs, and certainly not big enough to get into the circle of people the Government cares about. The people in question work hard. I have spoken to them recently and they tell me they cannot find anywhere to live within their means. They cannot afford a mortgage and, because of the way house prices have gone up, they do not earn enough to buy a house and they earn too much to qualify for housing assistance. They are literally caught in the middle. They ask the simple question of who are the Government policies supposed to help? They are not helping them. We can see they help vulture funds, investors and people with big money to buy loads of property and rent it out but who is it that the Government is supposed to be helping? I really hope he accepts the amendments tabled by my colleagues in order to ensure that at least something is done. However, he knows what the impact of putting RPZs in place where rents are already massively out of control is going to be. I urge him to listen to what the Opposition is saying, engage on the amendments and support the those that will make this legislation stronger and that will at least make a small difference in the lives of the people who are in desperate need.

Conor Sheehan (Limerick City, Labour)
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The way this entire issue has been approached by the Government has been nothing short of shambolic. A series of measures were leaked to the media and subsequently announced. A press conference was going on while we were in the Dáil on Tuesday of last week. What the Minister said at that press conference was different from what was in his press release, which was different again from what the Taoiseach had to say. Then we had the series of measures that were announced again this week in much haste and that were brought forward at the last minute. What was proposed last week very nearly caused a run on the rental market. This has given rise to huge concern among vulnerable renters in my constituency. It is very clear what the priority is here because investors will not be negatively impacted by these changes but renters will. There is one thing about investors that I know from my party's time in government. When my colleague Deputy Kelly was Minister for the environment, he brought in changes in relation to apartment sizes. At the time, he was told – we were all told – that this would be a panacea. However, the thing about these investors is they will always want more. If it is not apartment sizes, it is rent caps. They will come along in time and look for the Government to remove the very limited restrictions it has imposed on them.

Although RPZs zones are a blunt instrument, they are the only protection vulnerable renters have. It is really regrettable that in the context of the suite of changes being introduced, they will be made even more feeble. Rents in my city of Limerick have gone up by 20% in the past year. It is important to note that since RPZs were introduced, rents have gone up by 63.2%. That is hardly a ringing endorsement of RPZs as a policy measure. It shows how weak they are.

Labour has long called for the entire country to be made into an RPZ. This is something that Jan O’Sullivan first proposed as far back as 2016. The measures that were announced will only serve to increase rents and will negatively impact on particular renters who have short-term fixed tenancies such as students, junior doctors or short-term and migrant workers because when they leave their tenancy, which they do regularly because they have to, their rent will reset back to market rate.

There is a fundamental dishonesty about the way this has been communicated to the public. The Government is claiming it is banning no-fault evictions and it is but only in certain very limited situations. Large and institutional landlords usually offer leases of up to one year. Any ban on no-fault evictions will effectively not apply to them. This new system for smaller landlords will actively disincentivise them from providing long-term secure accommodation. We are talking about a policy measure designed to benefit those who are charging €3,000 a month in rent in order to deliver more build-to-rent supply in Dublin. It certainly will not deliver anything in Limerick and probably very little in Cork.

We have tabled amendments to tweak this Bill to ensure that, in terms of its scope, it will provide the strongest possible supports for renters. I am very disappointed that two of these, amendments Nos. 6 and 7, have been ruled out of order. We believe they fall within the scope of the Bill.

There is a provision in amendment No. 7 that a fine of €100,000 would apply in respect of landlords who break the law. This is designed to provide a real and genuine safety net for landlords. I am disappointed to have had these ruled out of order. I note there is nothing to stop the Government bringing forward its amendments. I ask the Government to seriously consider the measure that proposes a fine for landlords who do not comply.

We have also tabled an amendment to provide for a two-year rent freeze in light of the level by which rents have increased in the past decade and the fact that they will continue to increase under this regime. I ask the Government to work with us to accept the amendment and give hard pressed renters a break. The Government consistently does the same thing as the previous Government and the one before that but expects different results. The fact is that this is only going to negatively impact renters. There is no certainty that it will deliver the level of institutional investment the Government believes it will. The fact that the Bill is being debated a week after it was announced means that some landlords have already increased the rates. If the Government wants more evidence of that, it need only look on websites such as daft.ieand askaboutmoney.ie.

I have been inundated with emails from students who are concerned about what is proposed and how it will apply to them. Galway and my city, Limerick, have very little in the way of purpose-built student accommodation. We are heavily dependent on the private rental market in Limerick in order to house students. Students leave their accommodation every May and June and then scramble to find accommodation in late summer. Up to 100 students in Limerick are living in hotels during the week because they cannot get accommodation. The fact that there is nothing in the Bill to safeguard or protect students living outside of purpose-built student accommodation means that rents for those students will rocket and will increase every single year after they leave their accommodation.

I also want to talk about short-term lets. Some of the Minister's colleagues, including the Minister, Deputy Foley, and the Minister of State, Deputy Healy-Rae, have raised concerns about the regulation of short-term lets. Under the Bill, short-term lets will all come under the 2019 Eoghan Murphy legislation requiring owners to apply to their local county councils for planning permission. Given the delays in planning and the shortage of suitably qualified planners, I am eager to find out how the Government intends to deal with this and what additional resources local authorities and their planning departments will get. Local authorities are already understaffed, under-resourced and overworked. I am concerned there could be a level of chaos in regard to this.

Many students are very concerned because landlords are not registered with the RTB. There is a power imbalance between renters and landlords in this country. We have some of the weakest tenant rights in Europe. There is a clear need to beef up the RTB because it can barely cope with the volume of work and disputes it is currently dealing with. What additional measures and staffing resources will be put in place?

The Labour Party will not seek to actively obstruct the passage of the Bill. We will work constructively with all colleagues in the House to ensure that we put in place a suite of measures that safeguards renters above and beyond any other policy objective. That is our overriding priority.

As stated, I tabled a number of amendments, only one of which is in order. I ask the Government to work with us in the Labour Party, accept our amendment on a two-year rent freeze and perhaps consider bringing forward its amendments on a complete ban on no-fault evictions and the introduction of increasingly punitive measures for rogue landlords.

Rents have skyrocketed over the past decade. The measures in the Bill will, in the round, cause rents to increase again. My priority is renters and making sure that their rent does not go up any more. Under what is proposed by the Government, we will return to a situation whereby people will be evicted from their properties because they cannot pay the rent. There has not been an increase in the rate of HAP in over a decade. I ask the Government to consider what we are proposing and work with us within the remit of the Bill to strengthen it.

Robert Troy (Longford-Westmeath, Fianna Fail)
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I welcome the opportunity to contribute to the debate on the Bill. For the avoidance of any doubt and as most people know, I am a landlord, but that should preclude me from having the opportunity to contribute to debates on legislation.

A previous speaker mentioned that he has been inundated with calls from renters in Limerick who are worried about the future. Current renters in the city of Limerick, like those in County Westmeath, who are governed by existing or RPZ legislation will see no impact. They are protected. There is no change. There will be a 2% increase. Only if tenants choose to leave after six years can a landlord choose to increase rent. If tenants stay for ten years, there will be no difference. In fact, there will be greater protections. The 200,000 people who are currently renting in RPZs will see no difference. If anything, there will be enhanced protections. Let us be honest with people at the very beginning.

The vast majority of landlords are honest people who have bought a small number of properties to act as a form of pension fund. They want long-term leases and good tenants, and nobody is incentivising moving people on. Most tenants want to rent for a period in order that they can put together enough money to buy their own homes. We want a market that works.

The Government is bringing fairness, balance and stability to our housing market. The new framework strikes the right balance for existing tenants, and helps to protect them from sharp and unpredictable rent hikes and provides certainty in order to incentivise new landlords and developers to achieve a fair return and encourage continued investment in supply. The very basic principle of economics is supply and demand. Everybody understands that. If we do not have sufficient supply to meet the growing demand, we will not achieve the ultimate objective, which is to bring rents down to a more affordable level for all of our citizens.

We want to increase supply, and we have to incentivise people to come back into the rental market. This is something the Housing Agency recommended, in terms of modifying existing rent pressure zones. When we have debates in the Dáil, there is a serious contradiction on the part of people on the other side of the House who say that we need more housing and for houses to be built more quickly, but if they are in the wrong location in their constituencies they do not want those houses to be built. I can put my hand on my heart and say that in 21 years as a public representative, I never submitted a planning objection in respect of housing developments in my constituency, whether as a local councillor, a Minister of State or a Member of the Dáil. I do not think everybody on the other side of the House can say that.

We have to look at this in the round. The Minister, Deputy Browne, has made huge inroads since he was appointed, and this is one of the latest pieces in the jigsaw. There will be more. An additional €700 million has been secured for social and affordable housing.

There has also been the publication of the national planning framework to empower local authorities to zone more land. I hope the local authorities will not shirk their responsibilities because zoning more land will be central to unlocking further housing supply. Expanding the LDA's remit was passed at Cabinet yesterday. We have a Minister who is committed to increasing supply of social, affordable and private houses. Increasing supply to meet demand will ensure we rebalance the cost of rent for people who are renting and rebalance the cost of purchasing houses. This is something we can all agree on. We want to ensure a stable marketplace for the benefit of all of our citizens.

Séamus McGrath (Cork South-Central, Fianna Fail)
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With regard to the overall changes proposed by the Minister recently, I compliment him on the balance he has struck. The Opposition will always try to pit landlords against tenants, and have the narrative around tenants versus landlords. We have to focus on both groups and that is the reality. This is about increasing housing supply and we have to deal with the needs of tenants and landlords. The Minister has struck this balance and counteracted the narrative as best he could. This is an extremely complex area. Reforming rental protections and aspects of the rental market is extremely complicated and complex. What has come forward has been very well thought through and very substantive. I compliment the Minister and his team on it.

The overall changes proposed are about trying to activate supply and increase our housing output numbers. This is ultimately the solution to high rents and high house prices. We have to meet supply and demand. Unfortunately, we are long way off this at present despite the progress that has been made. Significant progress has been made in the housing area. If we go back five years we were developing 20,000 houses in this country. We are now developing more than 30,000. Ten years ago we were developing 12,000 houses. Significant progress is being made and this has to be acknowledged. If we were to listen to some in the Opposition we would think the Government is doing nothing about this.

We are pumping almost €7 billion of public funds into housing, which puts us as the top or second country in Europe in terms of our spend on housing. This is the way it should be. We are in a housing emergency. Of course, this is what we should be doing and possibly even increasing it further. The reality is that there has to be private equity also. I sat at a meeting of the housing committee yesterday and listened to the Housing Agency outline clearly to us how private equity has fallen off in terms of investment in housing. This is a significant concern and it is something we have to address. The changes the Minister has brought forward on the rental market will help in this respect. This is only one of the levers, as has been outlined by other speakers. A series of measures has been proposed by the Minister in recent times, with more to come, which will help with housing supply and activating and stimulating growth.

The Bill is short and it is very welcome. I appreciate the Opposition facilitating the Bill. At the housing committee yesterday it agreed to relax pre-legislative scrutiny. This is very important because it is about protecting renters in some parts of the country, whereby up to 17% of renters nationwide are not protected by the rent pressure zones. It is about bringing in this measure as a matter of urgency so that landlords do not increase rents prior to the bigger changes coming into place on 1 March. I very much welcome this and section 3 of the Bill provides for it. Section 4 of the Bill provides for the continuation of existing rent pressure zones until the end of February 2026 so the protections are in place for renters. This is an important measure. The Bill is very straightforward and it should be adopted as a matter of urgency. I hope we can conclude the business quite quickly. I compliment the Minister on the work he has done in this respect. It is striking the right balance. It is not an easy task but he has struck the right chord.

Martin Daly (Roscommon-Galway, Fianna Fail)
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I support the Bill. It is an important interim measure until the full extension of the RPZs happen next March. It is very important that protection is afforded to tenants in the interim. The Minister and Minister of State have demonstrated their concern that there would not be a precipice and that tenants would not be left vulnerable to some landlords. It would not be all landlords and we need to be careful of the language we use.

The extension of the rent pressure zones to the entire country is to be welcomed. It was a difficult process trying to thread that needle to balance the rights of tenants and landlords, and to encourage private investment in the housing market, most especially in the area of apartments. It is clear that targets were not met last year because of the precipitous fall-off of investment in building apartments. The status quo was simply not good enough. The State can carry a significant burden in terms of the cost of the provision of housing but it cannot carry it all and we do need private investment.

It is also important to note this is only part of a suite of measures coming through. There is the planning framework, the change in the role of the Land Development Agency and the extension of its remit, and the appointment of the chair of the planning commission. I am sure that under the new revised housing plan other measures will be introduced by the Minister. It is important that we show urgency in this matter. A generation of younger people expect it of us and if we do not deliver we will be judged accordingly.

Cathy Bennett (Cavan-Monaghan, Sinn Fein)
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I am simply aghast to see how the Government conducts its business with arrogance and incompetence. I recall some months ago there being a discussion on the role of inconsistent policy in driving investment away. In his press release last week, the Minister said this legislation is intended to introduce certainty. It is railroaded legislation in which we have already seen holes. It is poor legislation that will introduce a convoluted four-tiered rent pressure regime. It is unclear legislation, the detail of which has shifted across what has been at least four different contradictory and confusing announcements. This is Minister's attempt to introduce certainty. It is galling that with a straight face he has the arrogance to stand over this poorly-thought-out and ill-conceived piece of legislation in the House. This is the theme throughout Government and nowhere more so than in housing policy. The Government has an ideological opposition to building public homes on public land, especially if they are to be built by the State. We know this.

The public-private partnership scheme was a farce. Effectively the Government rediscovered the concept of council housing but had to make space in it for its investor friends to wet their beaks. It is right the Minister has pulled the plug on it but the manner in which he has done so, putting houses, jobs and taxpayers' money at risk, has been, again, a farce. It is gross incompetence. The Minister should have done this months ago and not left a building contractor with a significant liability. He should have done it months ago and not potentially exposed the State to a significant liability. He should have done it in a way that would not have put jobs at risk but he did not. The manner in which he did it is an illustration of the gross incompetence that is actually maladministration.

The legislation the Minister has brought before the House today is woeful. He forgot about the students in the midst of a student housing crisis. Selling the spiel that he will cut rents is an untruth. Was the Minister of further and higher education not present when this was brought to Cabinet? Has the Government forgotten about the student housing crisis? This is the reason we have a legislative process; it is for Bills to be adequately and appropriately scrutinised. However, the Government has no need for legislative conventions and norms. It wants uncertainty for institutional investors and that is its goal. Does the Minister honestly believe that how he has handled legislation will instil confidence? Sinn Féin is the party of confidence. We believe in having certainty in policy for the market and for homeowners and renters alike. We want to ban rent increases, ban no-fault evictions, support the reduction of the cost of rent, provide funding to bring vacant council houses back into use, adequately fund the tenant in situ scheme and mandate that interest rate reductions are passed onto homeowners.

The only certainty that Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are capable of bringing to the housing crisis is that they screw it up again and again. They should be deeply ashamed of their proposals today, which will, rather than cut rents, expose renters to increased rents, increased evictions and increased homelessness. Shame on the Minister of State and every one of the Government Members.

Rory Hearne (Dublin North-West, Social Democrats)
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This legislation, extending rent pressure zones to the rest of the country, is something the Social Democrats have called for before. We will not be opposing it. As part of the wider legislative changes the Government is proposing, however, we are deeply concerned about significant aspects of it. It is quite a cruel move to give renters around the country who will have an RPZ for six or seven months and then rip it away from them. The Government needs to be challenged again. It is not being honest when it says that renters in existing tenancies are protected. What happens when their tenancies come to an end? What happens when their landlords decide to sell the properties in six years' time? They will face market rents and a rental system and housing market that will be even more unaffordable. What the Government has done and is about to do is giving a very clear signal to landlords to up the rent.

The Government has no understanding of the reality of the private rental sector. If it actually understood what it is to be a renter in this country today, there is no way it would have provided measures that allowed landlords multiple loopholes and ways in which they could evict tenants and raise the rents to market rates between tenancies, be that in six years' time or when the tenancies ended. What will happen from 1 March is that landlords will start putting pressure on renters about needing to increase their rents. What powers do the renters have to challenge that? They can go to the RTB, which then starts a process that might, at some point, impose fine on the landlords. The reality for renters, who are terrified and just want to stay in their homes, is that this legislation that is coming down the tracks will mean they will be more disempowered because what they are facing is a rental market where rents will be brought up to the market rate across the board in the coming years. They will live and are being forced to live in more stress and anxiety. The Government claims its policy will protect renters. The real protection that renters need is from the policies of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, which view renters only as an income stream for investors.

If we look at the coming six years, the current 2% cap would mean that the rent would rise by 12%. What we will now see is the rent potentially rising by 40% to 50% over six years. The Government is justifying the increase in the rents as incentivising investor funds to build a supply of more expensive and unaffordable rental housing while rents will be allowed to rise in line with inflation. There will be no 2% cap. If inflation starts to rise to 3%, 4%, 5%, 10% or 20%, the rents will increase. This is not a recipe for solving the housing emergency; it is a one-way ticket to a permanent housing disaster, with our younger generation forced to be lifetime renters from institutional funds that have no cap on their rents and will be able to continuously increase rent and screw those young people of their lives, of their dreams and of their hopes of being able to buy homes of their own.

What kind of rental sector does the Government think it is creating? What is the best case scenario? Is it that renters suck up the poverty and homelessness and choose between rent and groceries for an undetermined number of years in the abstract hope that their rents will, at some point, get lower? The Government is taking a gamble, but it is gambling with renters' lives, betting on the likelihood that the free market and the investor funds will come through for renters. I do not like the odds and it is not a bet the Government should be making. Let us not call this "market rent" and keep legitimising it. Let us call it what the Government is actually proposing, namely, exploitation rents. It is back to the rack-rents of landlords that existed in this country many years ago. The Government is bowing to investors, lobbyists and landlords and giving them the green light to take whatever they can from renters.

The Government might not take it from me and might disagree with what I am saying, but I am sure it will listen to and have spoken to Mr. Mike Allen, head of advocacy for Focus Ireland. Speaking on RTÉ's "Six One" news, he said the steps being taken by the Government regarding rent were "incredibly complicated". He said "the increase in rent that's going to take place when landlords are allowed to reset to the market rent, that [rent] is going to be very substantial". Even with the protections from eviction, if the rent cannot be paid, the tenant will not be able to stay. The tenant will be evicted because the landlord will be able to do so.

The bigger question is how the State will keep up with the HAP payments to cover the higher rents. If the Government does not increase the HAP payments, how will renters in receipt of HAP keep pace with higher rents? As Mr. Allen said very accurately, "a solution which says 'we can deliver more housing, but the cost is that you won't be able to afford to live in it,' isn't a solution".

Dr. Michael Byrne, writing in today's Irish Examiner, which I am sure the Minister of State has read, raised a number of issues regarding the protections from eviction, including no-fault evictions, the Government is introducing. The Social Democrats have been calling for a ban on no-fault evictions for many years. It is deeply frustrating that so many people could have been prevented from being made homeless if the Government had implemented the no-fault eviction ban when we actually asked for it. Dr. Byrne wrote:

... it appears that landlords will still be able to evict within the six-year period if the property is required for ‘family use’.

This is a regrettable inclusion, as it undermines the objective of the policy by allowing for a form of eviction that the tenant can do nothing about and has no responsibility for.

Similarly, the hardship clauses for landlords could be wide open to exploitation by landlords. We know this because thousands of landlords already ignore the law. The Government is assuming that we have this rental system where landlords follow the law and the rules. They do not, and the Government knows this. Thousands, if not tens of thousands, of landlords are currently not even registered with the Residential Tenancies Board. They evict renters in an illegal manner. They charge rents higher than allowed in rent pressure zones. What is the Government doing? I do not see anything in the Government's measures that addresses the fundamental problem that we still have a rental system where the rules and laws are not obeyed by landlords and are not enforced sufficiently by the Residential Tenancies Board. Dr. Byrne goes on to make the point that we will have a situation where "the economic incentives of landlords are not aligned with the Government’s stated policy of creating long-term, secure rental homes. Dr. Byrne also wrote:

... a landlord who has tenants in and out every six months will be laughing all the way to the bank.

Similarly, when letting properties, landlords are now incentivised to rent to likely short-term tenants ... rather than likely long-term ones ...

This issue was raised yesterday at the Raise the Roof protest outside Leinster House, where hundreds of people took part, highlighting the devastating impact of the housing crisis.

I was talking to nurses and teachers on that protest who highlighted that, when they must shift placement or job in their training and education, they face a new rent, market rent and tenancy. It is similar for students. In another example of the disrespect shown towards our younger generations, students and key workers, the Minister initially said students would be protected, but now they will not be protected in the open market. How is this a serious policy when Government will not even do what it says it will do? The key workers I mentioned were hearing that we needed GPs, but GPs have very short placements and must move around. The key public servants we need - the nurses, teachers and doctors - now face a situation where they will be forced to pay higher rents as they engage in their placements and in the early years of their work. It is no wonder we cannot get teachers for our schools and they are leaving in their thousands for Australia and other parts of the world.

What will happen to rents? The Government said that rents would fall at some point. I have asked a question but we have not heard the answer. When are rents going to fall? The Government completely misled the public in the election by claiming it had turned the corner on housing. The truth is it manipulated the figures and knew the claim that 40,000 homes would be built was just another failed housing target. Now, it is misleading the public again with the claim that existing renters will not face rent increases. Of course they will when the tenancy ends and they must find a new tenancy. Of course they will when they are evicted from their home, which landlords will still be able to do. Of course they will if they must move around the country for their jobs. They will face higher rents because the Housing Agency, which did the report that underlined the Government's decision, said clearly that average rents would rise. Will the Government be honest with the public and say that this measure will lead to higher rents? It will and there is no getting away from that. The Government should at least have the decency and honesty to accept that it is making renters pay for the investor funds to incentivise - the illogicality of it - their supply of rental housing.

When will the investor funds reduce rents? At what point will institutional investors that want to charge €4,000 per month for a three-bedroom apartment reduce rents? At what point will Greystar, Kennedy Wilson, IRES REIT and the other landlords reduce rents? It is delusional thinking. It is market logic that does not apply because the housing system is not a market like milk, cars or commodities. The housing system operates from the fundamental point that people need a home and will pay whatever they can to try to get one. The market fails over and over in housing. That is why we have regulation and need public housing and why relying on institutional investors to provide a key source of supply of housing is a wrong-headed measure.

There are clear alternatives to this. We have proposed the homes for Ireland State saving scheme, which could leverage some of the €160 billion in private bank accounts. This could funnel billions of euro into not-for-profit housing bodies and local authorities to directly deliver affordable homes to buy and rent. The Taoiseach says it will take years to set up. Of course it will take years if the Government keeps delaying it and does not actually do it. If Government started doing it today, we could get it moving relatively quickly. If we said to people that here was a scheme and, if they put their deposits into it, they would help solve the housing crisis, I guarantee that there would be billions of euro in those accounts within a year. People across this country would say "Yes" and that they wanted their deposits to help solve the housing crisis. It is disingenuous of the Taoiseach and this Government to say week after week that the Opposition comes with no solutions or alternatives. Here is a solution and alternative, yet we see no move at all on it.

Other steps, such as taxing vacant and derelict properties, are half measures by the Government and not serious.

I wish to raise the issue of social housing projects, almost 180 of which are in Ballymun and Whitehall in my constituency. Some 500 social homes were ready to be built, with 280 due to start on site in the coming weeks. These were social homes in areas of the country that needed them most, but at the last minute, the Minister for housing pulled the funding from these projects. Some 500 social homes were pulled overnight. How can a Government justify cutting funding for social housing in the middle of an emergency? It is down to a lack of understanding. My understanding is that the Minister pulled the funding because the Government said those homes were too expensive. Of course they were too expensive. They are public-private partnership homes that include in the price the overall life cost of maintaining the properties. They are more expensive than just building the home, but we do not come along at the very end when diggers are literally about to start digging sites and homes are starting to be built and say we are pulling it. What will happen is no homes will be built there for a year or longer, and the Government has not even come with an alternative. It is a shameful decision that needs to be reversed.

We should not be surprised when this is the same Government that gutted the tenant in situ scheme. Dublin City Council informed me, when I asked on behalf of constituents who were facing eviction into homelessness, that it would no longer be purchasing properties this year where the tenant was facing eviction because it did not have the funding from the Department of housing. This is truly criminal. I said at the Raise the Roof protest outside the Dáil yesterday that all we heard from the Government was this talk about how it wanted to remove barriers and blockages to housing when the biggest blockage to solving the housing disaster was actually this Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and Lowry-backed Independent Government. They are the ones blocking schemes like the social housing projects due to start in Dublin, Kildare, Wicklow and Sligo and the tenant in situ scheme, which was preventing people from being made homeless. They are blocking ideas like the homes for Ireland State saving scheme, which could be putting billions of euro into delivering affordable homes, never mind using the budget surplus to directly fund local authorities, not-for-profit housing bodies and the Land Development Agency to immediately fast-track the projects they could be delivering.

Regarding this Bill, we are in favour of extending rent pressure zones across the country. We facilitated this in the housing committee yesterday and we will not oppose it being moved. On the basis of what is coming forward, though, we are clear that we will be opposing the legislation the Government is planning to bring in the coming months that will essentially make sacrificial lambs of renters in this country, particularly the younger generations. I do not know whether it is in the Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael psyche but there is something of pulling up the ladder behind them in this. There is a mentality of protecting those who are there. It is like they would protect the property prices of the homeowners but whoever came after would be sacrificed because Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael wanted a short-term political benefit. How is it acceptable to hand our younger generations over to the institutional funds, which will be able to charge whatever rent they want? Inflation is what the rent will be linked to. We will see the new market rents they will be able to raise rents to, given that these tenancies change every couple of years. When one looks at the percentage change since 2020 and Covid, market rents have increased by 43%. If one had applied the 2% cap, they would only have increased by 10%. That is what renters will be facing.

They will face multiple percentages of increases in their rent if they have to change their tenancy and move, or if they are trying to move out of their childhood bedroom where half a million people are stuck trying to find somewhere to rent. It is deeply disappointing that we have not seen the change in direction that is so badly needed. People will be out on the streets of Cork in their hundreds and thousands this weekend. They will be out again for the CATU demonstration on 5 July and there will be more protests, because people have had enough.

Catherine Ardagh (Dublin South Central, Fianna Fail)
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It is very difficult to listen to my friend's sanctimonious rant on this issue. We all know from junior cert economics-----

Rory Hearne (Dublin North-West, Social Democrats)
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It is very hard to listen to this, with the level of homelessness we have.

John McGuinness (Carlow-Kilkenny, Fianna Fail)
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Deputy Hearne, you had your turn.

Catherine Ardagh (Dublin South Central, Fianna Fail)
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I am sure the Deputy is familiar with this. I think he is a lecturer in economics. We know from junior cert economics that when supply is increased in the market, prices stabilise, if not come down. This is something we have probably all studied and it is really the basics of economics; it is economics 101.

I am very glad to speak on this Bill. It is about ensuring fairness, certainty and protection for renters across the country. My constituency of Dublin South-Central has been part of a rent pressure zone, RPZ, for quite a while. Renters there have benefitted from some these crucial protections. Make no mistake; the Bill is hugely important for us, as my friend already said, because it brings the rest of the country in line with the RPZ legislation and gives consistency to renters around the country. From the day it passes, every single part of Ireland will become an RPZ. This means that rent increases will be capped at 2% or the rate of inflation, whichever is the lower. This is not just a minor adjustment but rather a simple, clear and strong protection for people who are trying to plan their lives in what has been an incredibly unpredictable rental market.

This Bill is about much more than just rent caps. It is also the vital first part of a wider set of reforms that will come into effect from March 2026. These reforms will ensure that we will see more supply in the market, because that is what we need. We know that if supply increases, rents come down. That is what people want in the long term. From March 2026, all new tenancies will come with six-year security of tenure, which is a game changer for stability. There will also be a significant end to no-fault evictions, especially in the case of landlords with multiple units. We will introduce more transparency and fairness in rent reviews. This will ensure a level playing field for everyone.

I would like the Minister to ensure that Residential Tenancies Board, RTB, is properly funded. At the moment there are huge delays and it is very difficult to get any sort of decisions both for landlords and renters. For renters in Dublin South-Central, whether they are front-line workers in Kilmainham or a single parent in Rialto, these long-term changes will make it genuinely easier for them to stay in their homes, raise their families and finally have the much-needed stability they need.

We know that 83% of tenancies in Ireland are currently in RPZs. This tells us two critical things. First, that rent controls work when they are targeted and sensible. Second, it is now abundantly clear that it no longer makes sense to have a patchwork of rules depending simply on the post code. In Europe, RPZ have historically worked well. This brings us in line with other European countries.

In Dublin South-Central, we have been living with the aspects of these rules for quite some time. They have genuinely helped renters across the city. Now we need the next stage, which includes six-year leases, proper eviction protections and the consistency across the country, which this Bill brings. I commend my colleague, the Minister, Deputy Browne, and the Minister of State, Deputy O'Donnell, on bringing this legislation forward. There is so much work to do when it comes to housing in Ireland. It is a crisis and we all need to be working together to come up with solutions. This is a good solution. I think everyone said they were backing the solution, backing the idea of extending the RPZs to the whole country. We need to work together on this crisis because we live on a small island. It is a crisis and if we can put our shoulders to the wheel, as the Minister has, we will see proper results.

Shane Moynihan (Dublin Mid West, Fianna Fail)
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Gabhaim buíochas leis an Leas-Cheann Comhairle. Is mór agam an deis seo labhairt ar an mBille seo agus ar na himpleachtaí a bheidh ag baint leis do thionóntaí ar fud na tíre agus an éifeacht a bheidh aige ar mhargadh na gcíosanna. Gan amhras, tá an géarchéim thithíochta ar cheann de na géarchéimeanna is mór atá os comhair na tíre faoi láthair. Tá sé in am dúinn féachaint ar gach uile réiteach is féidir linn a chur i gcrích le cinntiú go rachaidh muid i ngleic léi. Is é an rud is tábhachtaí le cuimhneamh faoi seo ná nach bhfuil aon réiteach amháin uirthi seo. Is iomaí aghaidh atá ag an ngéarchéim thithíochta faoi láthair, lena n-airítear daoine gan dídean, cíosanna arda agus daoine nach bhfuil in ann teach a cheannach agus a leithéid. Caithfear réitigh a dhearadh a rachaidh i ngleic leis na himpleachtaí agus gnéithe na faidhbe seo faoi mar atá siad faoi láthair.

I thank the Leas-Cheann Comhairle for the opportunity to speak on this legislation and I welcome the fact that across the House there is general consensus on the need to expand the RPZs to the entire country, which is the purpose of this Bill in the first instance. It is also helpful to look at this Bill in the context of the wider reforms that it forms part of. I am sure that in our clinics all of us hear on a daily and weekly basis of people who are struggling with the rental market here, whether that is on the basis of the cost of rent or, more so, in the past few months, of supply. People are telling us they cannot get access to rental accommodation because the supply does not exist in the market. Despite the fact that we have now rolled cost-rental schemes and more social homes are being built, there is still a role for the private sector, both institutional investors and smaller landlords, across the market to ensure they have incentives in the market to maintain their properties. This is not just me saying it; it is the ESRI saying it, that while there has been a moderation in rent increases over time, the incentives for people to maintain properties in the market is not there, especially since 2021, and should be required in the future.

On what the Government needs to do to address this issue, there are two sides to the story. There is obviously the case to protect existing tenants. That is why the extension of the RPZs to the entire country is a welcome move to ensure that those pieces are put in place. I should also mention the protections my colleague, Deputy Ardagh, referred to such as no-fault evictions and so on.

There are also people who do not have access to rental yet, because the supply is not there. The only way to encourage supply, from small landlords and institutional investors, is to create a situation where they can at least break even on the properties they are making available. Where the 2% rate falls below the inflation rate, it is not one where the incentive is created or necessary. This was also found in the Housing Agency's review of this matter published a number of weeks ago. The paper by Dr. Tom Gillespie of Trinity College found that the rental supply has contracted since the expansion of the RPZs in 2021 and that this needs to be addressed in light of any modified rental assistance that is put in place. It is important that this is done now at the start of the lifetime of the Government because we need to get these reforms put in place to create the incentives to increase supply.

We need to reflect on Housing for All. The disappointing figures for the past year are not the only reflection of it. If we take the sum total of the houses that were delivered on target under Housing for All, we exceeded those targets over the lifetime of the plan. It is important to remember that as well.

This rental reform will work. It will protect tenants. It will allow for the reset of rents between tenancies to make sure that the incentive remains for people to provide more accommodation and it will lead to the converse of what was seen immediately after 2021, where there was an increase in the number of houses being put up for sale, as opposed houses being made available for rent. When we talk about pulling the ladder up after ourselves, we should be very conscious of the fact that there are many people who cannot get on to the ladder at all, because the supply is not there. It falls to us that we create the incentive for that supply to be put in place.

Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent)
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Leanfaidh mé ar aghaidh ar aon nós. Níl a fhios agam cé mhéid nóiméad atá agam.

John McGuinness (Carlow-Kilkenny, Fianna Fail)
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Seacht nóiméad.

Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent)
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There are three speakers, if they turn up.

John McGuinness (Carlow-Kilkenny, Fianna Fail)
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Yes, the group has 21 minutes.

Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent)
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Tuigim. Leanfaidh mé ar aghaidh until they come. Go raibh míle maith agat. Unfortunately, the Deputy who made the allegation of sanctimonious wrath against a colleague in another party has left. I cannot think of anything more inappropriate from a TD who is part of the Government that is standing over a housing crisis. The only sanctimonious wrath that I have ever heard in this Chamber has been from successive Governments. They have used it as a tool and a weapon to obfuscate, avoid and confuse as a way of not analysing the problem. Sanctimonious wrath is an interesting phrase when we look at the fact that almost 16,000 people are homeless. I use these figures. I have been in the Dáil since 2016.

The Minister of State knows that very well. He is familiar with Galway from me harassing him - I take that word back - from constantly asking him about the task force in Galway that should not be there because it is not functioning.

We have no choice but to support the legislation to extend the RPZs to the entire country. The Bill has been introduced in a chaotic and disorderly fashion, with no pre-legislative scrutiny. The committee had to agree with that given the urgency of the Bill. No scheme is ever analysed or studied in the context of what has happened. We keep adding pieces of the jigsaw but we are getting no picture, except to hear that the market will provide.

I wondered what I could say today. I have said it over and over again. The phrase "sanctimonious rot" inspired me to stand up and say: "Good Lord, this is what we are dealing with." There are almost 16,000 people homeless. We have normalised homelessness and we lack security of tenure. We have turned language on its head, just like we have with international relations with Gaza and Israel.

We are creating a very serious problem in Ireland where, more and more, there is a lack of faith in anything the Government says. I do not wish that on any government because it is very dangerous. Words must mean something. Policies must mean something. We deal with that when we talk about disinformation. Most of the disinformation I am concerned about arises from the Government, whether it is national or international politics.

Specifically on housing, when I left the local authority in Galway in 2016 the city was in the middle of a housing crisis. I became a TD, which gave me a privileged role. In 2018 and 2019, we talked about a task force because of the emergency in Galway. That task force has sat for year after year with no report being given or any analysis of the problem and what led to the housing crisis in Galway city and county. The task force is on its second chair. I do not wish to personalise it, but both chairs have serious experience. The Department and the councils are represented on it. By December of last year, it finally asked the question. I said this the other night. I hate repeating, but I am going to repeat that the new chair is finally asking the question. The task force was set up in 2019. In December 2024, the date of the latest minutes available to me – I am out of date with my minutes, such is the up-to-dateness of the task force - it told us that the delivery figures are going in the wrong direction. It told us we need to look at how we are going to overhaul housing delivery and get it massively ramped up. The task force has begun to ask what are the obstacles and seven years after it was set up, it has set out what those obstacles are. One of the major obstacles is that we did not build any houses. We stopped building in 2009.

We did not build any infrastructure. I do not know if it was the chair or one of the members of the new infrastructure task force who talked about objectors being a problem in an interview with Claire Byrne. I was singularly unimpressed. I repeat that infrastructure was not built, meaning we have no second treatment plant on the east side of Galway city. We have none in Carraroe. We cannot have balanced development. We had a debacle over Uisce Éireann. We were forced into condemning it. It was a case of divide and conquer, rather than resourcing the local authorities, which had all the knowledge. We have not resourced them to provide housing either.

Tomorrow, the Committee of Public Accounts will talk to the Department of housing. My colleagues and I have attempted to look at the documentation we have got. My God, I do not know how many schemes are now in place for housing. We have a housing crisis. We have children living in homeless accommodation. A delegation from Simon has gone to meet the Minister today about the mental health problems and other health problems arising from homelessness.

We are dealing with the consequences of the decisions of successive governments to treat housing as a product to be bought and sold, to back up the market, to change housing policy with the stroke of a pen in 2014. A pilot project was run on the housing assistance payment. It was said that people were adequately housed once they got a HAP payment. I was called a liar. I said I was very close to being a lawyer, but not quite, at the time. I was called a liar when I said that people were taken off the list once they received HAP. I was subsequently proven to be correct. Problem after problem was created.

My staff, like the staff of other TDs, are finding it very difficult to deal with the level of housing problems that are coming in. There are people who have been up to 16 years on a waiting list in Galway who have been made homeless. People are living in cars and coming in to us begging. We are told the homeless services are chock-a-block. The Simon Community produces a report every quarter. It tells us that there are no properties available under the HAP scheme, even the discretionary scheme. The task force is going nowhere and around in circles.

I am at the point of despair with the problems created by Government policy. One essential part of the solution is public housing on public land. We have not done it in Galway since 2009. The Land Development Agency is going to get more power to use public land to build premium housing down in the docks.

I do not wish to go on for the sake of it. I did not wish to speak at all today because I have spoken so often, sometimes for a minute and at other times for 15 minutes, on a housing crisis that is a deliberate consequence of Government policy of relying on the market. We have made housing into a product.

I have two sons in Dublin who are renting. I know exactly how it is from my office in Galway. The situation is chaotic. When a government gets to the point where it has normalised homelessness, we are in serious trouble as a republic.

Roderic O'Gorman (Dublin West, Green Party)
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I am speaking on behalf of the Green Party on the Residential Tenancies (Amendment) Bill, which has been drafted and delivered at speed. I will come back to the point about speed in a moment.

I will focus my remarks on one particular cohort of renters, namely, student renters. One the question of speed, I spoke at the launch of the Raise the Roof motion on Monday. I said the Government was in complete panic mode when it came to housing. The treatment of this Bill is a perfect example of that panic. The legislation was approved by the Cabinet on 17 June and published the same day. The Bill is now progressing through this House in a single day, with all Stages taken today. There was no pre-legislative scrutiny, regulatory impact assessment or formal consultation with student representatives. We know from experience that rushed legislation seldom results in a fair or balanced outcome, in particular when it comes to housing.

I understand that sometimes we have to move legislation rapidly. I had to do it myself. This is not rapid, however; it is reckless. I have no doubt mistakes will come to light in the debate here or in the Seanad but because there is not sufficient time to go through the Bill in detail and to introduce Committee Stage amendments, I expect we will bring in amendments to the legislation in the autumn term. I have no doubt about that.

We know that student renters are under real pressure. Last year, UCC students' union did a survey of more than 3,000 students, which was strongly representative. More than 50% of respondents said that housing costs were their most significant source of pressure. Nearly two thirds said the cost of housing was harming their health and well-being. This Bill is not going to address those issues; in fact, it will compound them.

Under this Bill, rent can be reset to market rates whenever a tenancy ends. This might sound innocent enough, but in the student context, where most leases run from September to May, it means students could see a rent increase every academic year, even when they return to the exact same room. This undermines the goal of rent caps and introduces instability for students. It makes long-term affordability impossible to predict.

Despite the scale of the student housing sector, this Bill offers no legal definition of student tenancies. Such a definition matters. Without a formal category, it is unclear how or whether these tenancies can be tailored to the unique needs of students. The Minister for higher and further education, Deputy James Lawless, recently said students should not be inadvertently disadvantaged by the new rental laws. He spoke about designating a certain category for student tenancies. He said that could be part of a solution. He is right. That solution is not in this Bill but it should be.

To address these problems, I am asking the Minister, perhaps when he is bringing the legislation to the Seanad because it cannot be done here, to adopt the following approaches: tie rent caps to the property and not just to the lease so students returning to the same room are not charged new market rent each year; and, importantly, give a legal definition to student tenancy allowing academic year leases to be regulated in line with their unique situation. These are not radical asks. They are practical adjustments that would make this legislation better for a group that is vital to Ireland's future and is already facing real pressures.

Students are not luxury tenants. They are our future nurses, engineers and researchers. They cannot afford to live near their universities. They live with the constant stress of rising costs that we as legislators have heaped on them and failed to address at this point. This element of the Bill is not beyond repair, but it does need revision. It needs to recognise the structural realities of student accommodation. It needs to close those gaps that allow for exploitative pricing under the cover of technical compliance. Let us protect all tenants, not just in principle but in practice as well. Let us not pass legislation that looks fair on paper, only to realise too late that it allows sharp increases in rent where stability is most needed. We have some time between this Bill going from this House to the next House. Let us make those amendments.

Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, Solidarity)
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It is interesting in debates in the House and on the media how the Government will not own its own proposals. It tells us that what it is doing is going to increase investment in the rental sector and that will ultimately bring rents down. That is the underlying logic of what the Government is doing. However, it refuses to say the bit in the middle in terms of why this is going to increase investment in the rental sector. This is because the plan is to raise rents. Every time the Government is asked this, it tries to wriggle away from it and say that there are lots of things. The fundamental, most important thing the Government is doing is trying to allow rents to rise even faster. That is Government policy now. It is to increase rents in the supposed hope that through increasing them, rents will come down in the long run. It is the magic of market. The Government expects people to buy this. It expects people to believe that somehow it is acting in the interests of those who it is hiking rents for - young people who are forced to emigrate or are unable to move out of the family home and workers who are being crucified by rents of €2,000, €2,500, €3,000 or more per month - by allowing rents to go even higher, rather than this clearly being an act of a Government of landlords acting in the interests of landlords, in particular the big corporate landlords.

I will focus on the same issue that Deputy O'Gorman focused on, namely, student accommodation. Students are the group that are most egregiously affected by what the Government is proposing. Students in the private rental sector are not going to have any protections whatsoever as regards the level of rents. Every time they return to college, they are going to see a new and significant hike in their rents. The day after the Government announced its new proposals, the Minister for higher education, Deputy Lawless, was in before us at the committee on higher education and I asked him about this. I put it to him that the way this will work is that there will be no rental protection for students in private rented accommodation every time they change tenancy and so on and asked if that was accurate. He stated the following:

We have a new proposal, which was introduced yesterday that will come in to effect next March. There will be a lot of water under the bridge between now and next March. I will sit down with my colleague, the Minster for housing, with whom I have spoken numerous times on student accommodation, and we will delve into the details about how it will effect the student accommodation sector.

I could not believe that the Minister for higher education, who was telling us that a priority was student accommodation, did not seem to know how this was going to affect student, but was reassuring us that it would be grand, there was loads of time between now and March, the Government would sort it out and students would be not negatively affected.

I read with interest the newspaper headlines on Monday. I thought this is good because here we have a Minister who is listening to the Opposition and is going to protect students. The headline in The Irish Times was "Minister wants exemptions to new rent rules to be considered for students sharing houses". It continues: "Students should not be 'inadvertently disadvantaged' by the new regime, says spokesman for James Lawless." On Tuesday, however, presumably all of the water under the bridge had passed. We read in the front-page headline in the Irish Independent that there are "No additional protections for students in private sector under new rental rules, Minister admits". That is it. I was accurate in my summation of things at the committee. In saying that there was a load of water going to pass under the bridge and do not worry things will be fine by March, the Minister was trying to mislead people, or he did not know what was happening. The truth is that students are being thrown to the wolves by this proposal. It is incredible, when housing is the number one crisis facing the third level education system, that students are going to be taken out of any protection whatsoever.

There are a few things that the Government often likes to say to the Opposition. It says that we have no proposals. We can write books on it, as two Members have. We can put forward detailed proposals on budget proposals and in policy, but no matter what we do the Government will say that we have no proposals. No matter the level of detail that we produce, it will say that we have no proposals. The other thing it will say is that the Opposition is being ideological or that we have an ideological aversion to the private rental market. We are expected to believe that the Government has no ideology whatsoever. For ten years now, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have been trying to incentivise the private sector, be it private developers or the institutional investors, to come and resolve the housing crisis. Money has been thrown at them. They do not pay any taxes on rental income when they are real estate investment trusts, REITs.

There is the Croí Cónaithe scheme and the HAP scheme, which costs more than €1 billion per year, and there are other subsidises to landlords every single year. There is the waiver of development levies. Money is thrown at these developers and private landlords. The crisis has got worse not better. The Government goes back into the same toolbox - one marked "free market fundamentalism" - and says we need rents to rise further because that is what is going to resolve the crisis as it will attract investment. The Government expects us to believe that it has no ideology. It is free market fundamentalism. It is a trickle-down idea of what is going to happen with housing.

It is interesting to read the report that the Government is basing its own proposals on rental pressure zones and increasing rents further. It is clear there that institutional investors are making healthy profits in the rental sector in Ireland. They are not making a loss; they are making a healthy profit. The idea is that we need to give them even more profit so that they invest here in this sector rather than somewhere else. How, without free market fundamentalist ideology, does it make any sense that we transfer more money of workers, either directly or indirectly through the State or directly from workers through paying more rent, to the super rich in the hope that they are will resolve the housing crisis? How does that make sense as opposed to saying that we have money and financial surpluses, we have a housing crisis, building housing creates revenue and we therefore need to build social and genuinely affordable housing at scale, directly through a State construction company? That is the answer to the housing crisis and the centre of the answer for supply. The reason it is not pursued is ideology and what lies behind that ideology are class interests. The Government fundamentally does not represent renters, workers and young people. Instead, it represents big landlords, big private developers and the rest.

Peter Cleere (Carlow-Kilkenny, Fianna Fail)
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This Government is protecting renters. Not only are we protecting renters, we are moving as quickly as possible on this. In line with last week's Government approval for the urgent drafting of legislation to extend and expand the operation of the RPZs, I welcome the publication of the necessary legislation, the Residential Tenancies (Amendment) Bill, for urgent enactment today. The reality is that if we did nothing, the rent pressure zones as they stand would have fallen at the end of this year. That is a fact. It is essential that we provide all who rent with absolute certainty and also provide certainty to those who want to invest in home and apartment building.

While I acknowledge that the rental measures announced recently have been necessarily complex to respond to different situations in our rental market, the key message here is simple. The Government wants to provide certainty, clarity and stability for the rental sector, including for those who rent and those who let their properties. It is therefore essential, as an interim measure, for all tenants to be protected as soon as possible under the current rent increase restrictions that apply to RPZs. This Bill will provide that necessary protection for all tenants until 28 February 2026, but to be absolutely clear, for the almost 200,000 people who are renting in a tenancy that is part of an RPZ right now, absolutely nothing will change. Their rents cannot be reset after six years if they remain in their tenancies. They remain in a rent pressure zone. The bottom line is that, as a result of these reforms, renters will have much stronger protections than ever before. All renters across the country will now be covered by RPZs, including in my constituency of Carlow-Kilkenny, which I am delighted about.

The only way we can deal with the housing crisis is to dramatically increase supply. I think everyone is in agreement about that. However, we have increased it from 2020 onwards to about 30,000 units per year. Until then, we had 20,000 units per year. We have to get to 50,000 units per year. We need public investment, which we are providing as the State is the largest investor in the housing market at the moment. Almost €7 billion will be invested in 2025 alone, but we need more. It is envisioned that €20 billion will be required to get to the necessary targets. It cannot be done alone. We need substantial private sector investment as well. We are in a crisis we need to deal with as a society, but it cannot be done with State investment alone. We need the private sector to play its part as well and it needs to be helped and supported to do so.

Ryan O'Meara (Tipperary North, Fianna Fail)
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I say again that housing is the number one issue affecting my generation. It was the biggest issue by far and away for me on the doors, whether I was speaking to people my own age; getting messages from people on social media saying they would love to be able to come home and afford a home; parents who said when I knocked on doors that their adult children were still living at home, as I am also; or grandparents worried about their grandchildren's future in this country and how they will be able to afford to live here, rent or buy an affordable home.

I welcome and support this Bill which is about protecting renters. We are moving swiftly on this as a Government and I welcome the work of the Minister of State and that of his colleagues in the Department on it. Following last week's approval by the Government of the urgent drafting of the legislation to extend and expand the operation of the rent pressure zones, we are now bringing this Bill to the House today. While the rental measures announced have been necessarily complex for what is a very complex issue to respond to the different situations we are seeing in the rental market, it is important we provide clarity, stability and certainty for the rental sector, including those who rent or let properties. There was a balance to be struck between trying to get more investment into the private market, which is essential, and protecting renters. We have some of the most protective measures in any rental market in Europe and one of the highest levels of regulation in the European Union.

It is important, as an interim measure, for all tenants to be protected as soon as possible under the current rent increase restrictions that apply to the RPZs. This Bill provides that necessary protection for all tenants until 28 February 2026. It provides for a two-month extension, until February 2026, to the operation of the existing RPZs. It also provides for non-rent pressure zones to become rent pressure zones, including in my constituency, from the day after enactment of the Bill. This is about providing certainty, clarity and stability for the rental market. It is important as an interim measure for all tenants to be protected as soon as possible under the current rent increase restrictions that apply to RPZs. The Bill provides that necessary protection for all tenants.

The simple fact is that we have a record level of State investment in housing, but State investment alone cannot fix this problem. I recognise that supply has increased but we have a long way to go. A big part of that simply has to be the private market. The State is doing an enormous amount of work. It needs to do an awful lot more, but opening up private investment to come into the market to build in particular the apartments we need at scale will be a key component of how we start to reach those targets.

While I discussing housing, I will go slightly off topic and take the opportunity to again mention log cabins, modular buildings and modern methods of construction. I welcome what has been done by the Government to date and what has been spoken about to date. We need to see urgent action but we need to go beyond the planning exemption for back-yard dwellings and go to more modular units and log cabins where it is appropriate, that is, where planning is appropriate and we can get connections to utilities such as wastewater treatment and so forth. There is a place for them in the market. I am convinced of that. For young people who want their own homes, those who have a site and home and want to build, the only way it would be affordable is through those and I ask the Minister of State to seriously take that into account.

I look forward to supporting this Bill and introducing more measures and protections for renters currently in the market, but also spurring on supply from the private sector, along with all the massive work being done through public investment in housing.

Edward Timmins (Wicklow, Fine Gael)
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I welcome the extension of rent pressure zones to all parts of the country. By any measure, this Government and the previous one have done many things to protect renters.

I want to blow away the myth that tenants are not protected in this country. I have experience of other European countries. These are often cited as being much more favourable to tenants. This is often not the case. In Germany, for example, if tenants do not pay their rent for two months in a row, landlords can quickly get a court order to evict them. This is quickly followed by a bailiff coming to evict. That is not the case in this country. Similarly, no-fault evictions apply in Germany if landlords wish to use the property for themselves or their families. This Bill protects tenants and that protection also takes effect the day after its enactment.

However, the best way to protect tenants is to have an increased supply. We can bring in all the rules in the world, but if there is a shortage of houses, those rules have limited impact. They can also often have unintended consequences. For example, many landlords have left the market in the past few years because of more and more regulation. The challenge in this country arose because of a successful economy that has delivered 100,000 additional jobs per annum along with the resulting increase in population. Jobs and population increases happen much more quickly than house building. A tap cannot be switched on for house building. It occurs on a longer timescale than increases in demand and, equally, it can quickly fall away.

The Government continues to make many changes that will speed up house building. To give an international context to this, many countries have severe challenges with house and apartment building. For example, China had a massive oversupply until a year ago, with 60 million empty units at one stage. On the other hand, Germany has a housing shortage, like us, and had a target of 400,000 units for 2024, but only completed approximately 230,000. That is equivalent to Ireland having a target of 25,000 and building 14,000 because Germany's population is 16 times bigger. We need to put our situation in context.

I have yet to see a convincing policy from the Opposition that would make a difference in housing delivery. The solution to housing supply is not a few particular elements. It is a combination of a huge number of things. Recent proposals from the Government are just one part of the solution. We must continue to bring more changes to maintain this momentum. For example, the cost of building a home is too high. We must look at moves to reduce this cost. In many parts of the country, the cost of building a home exceeds the market price so no one will build. Hence, no new house building is taking place, yet there is demand for housing in these areas. This is a clear example of where Government intervention would help, for example, by reintroducing a waiver for development levies. This worked well in the past and can be the difference between a builder deciding to build or not. Alternatively, we could consider a temporary reduction in VAT to kick-start building. A special focus on affordable housing is also needed to allow it to be expanded. Finally, the main focus must be on all the State agencies and local authorities working closely together to solve this big problem.

Ruairí Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein)
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We saw the rent pressure zones as limited and imperfect, but the idea was that it was better to have some element of defence rather than none whatsoever. We have seen that they are incapable of holding back the tide of rent increases. While we might not oppose this legislation, we are utterly opposed to what is being proposed by the Government. We have all spoken about the issues in the House. The issue is that rents are through the roof and are constantly going up. The only thing that we see in regard to what is being proposed by the Government is that rents will increase again. House prices have been astronomical. People who previously could have afforded a house based on what would previously have been considered very good jobs cannot afford one at this point. That does not look like it is going to be improved in any way, shape or form. Homelessness numbers are through the roof, and they will continue going through one roof after another. These are the targets the Government seems to have no difficulty surpassing. It just gets worse and worse. That is the problem.

We are doing what we are doing not on the basis of protecting renters. I agree with many that there are plenty of issues regarding landlords and tenants, who have not been protected over many years. However, this is about investment funds having the ear of the Government. It is incredibly saddening that we are not talking about anything that will rapidly increase supply. I agree that we need to deal with the issues of planning, Uisce Éireann and our lack of infrastructure. We know the gamut of issues that exist in the planning process in the context of builders who cannot access finance and who are constantly impacted by all the red tape that we are very good at producing.

We have all seen the problems when trying to deal with the local authorities. The local authority in my constituency was building a particular project and had to deal with two elements of the Department. The project was tendered but it took so long to get agreement between the two arms of Government that the tender ran out. When it was okayed, the local authority went back to ask if the developer would follow through, but he said “No”, so the tender process started again. Luckily, we are now further on, but these are the things that are constantly happening. It is a matter of ensuring that we have the funding, that we do not have obstacles in the way and that we get very serious. That is going to mean serious investment and the delivery of social and affordable rental and affordable purchase homes, which is what we really need to see.

I want to use this opportunity to deal with the issue of disability housing. Unfortunately, housing adaptation grants have come to a crux in Louth County Council, which is in need of further money. This is impacting people's ability to live in their own homes, and it needs to be dealt with. I have raised the issue of the capital assistance scheme for disability housing a number of times in recent days. The St. John of God organisation contacted me regarding the fact it was in discussions with the two local authorities in Meath and Louth about the purchase of a number of homes. I have spoken to the Minister about this previously. I got a reply to a parliamentary question which said that CAS funding was open. However, the issue is that CAS funding is now part of the same social housing acquisition fund as the tenant in situ scheme and all the rest. County councils are telling St. John of God that they do not have enough money. This previously was not part of that allocation so it has created a huge issue. We are talking about a number of people with disabilities. We all want to see decongregated settings and we do not want to go back to what we had previously. However, there are a number of properties that cannot be bought at this point. I accept that this is an unintended consequence. I have issues with what has happened around the tenant in situ scheme, but I ask the Minister to address this matter as soon as possible.

Michael Collins (Cork South-West, Independent Ireland Party)
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I am grateful for the opportunity to speak on the Bill. The Minister will know I am not a man who is interested in theatrics or Government back-pats, but a Deputy elected by the people of west Cork to speak truthfully and plainly about the reality we face in the absolute failure this emergency RPZ Bill represents. This legislation is not a solution. It is a symptom of a Government chasing headlines and running away from problems of its own creation while abandoning the very families it claims to serve. It is not Independent Ireland's vision for a better, fairer or freer housing system.

The Minister wants us to believe that this Bill is about stability but for whom? It is certainly not for young people trying to buy their first home, the small landlord trying to rent fairly or the nurse commuting 90 minutes because she cannot afford a flat near the hospital. This Bill is about one thing: the illusion of control. It is panic dressed up as a policy. Rent pressure zones were meant to be temporary. Like every half-baked policy this Government has brought forward, however, they have become a permanent fixture, stifling supply, squeezing out small landlords and doing precious little to meaningfully reduce rents. Now, with this emergency legislation, the Government wants to stretch that failed model across the country like a Band-Aid on a broken leg. This Bill discourages the very participation it needs to work. It tells landlords they are not partners in the housing solution; they are the problem. That is not just wrong; it is reckless. It is undermining supply and undermining communities.

In my constituency of Cork South-West, I speak weekly to builders and farmers’ sons and daughters who are trying to build on family land. Every one of them has hit a brick wall, be it with planning, bureaucracy, rising materials costs or rental laws written with Dublin 4 in mind, not Dunmanway or Bantry. What does this legislation offer them? It offers more red tape, more fear and more planning restrictions. The Bill expands RPZ restrictions without one meaningful commitment to increase housing supply in rural Ireland.

Independent Ireland has called loudly for streamlined rural planning for in-person preplanning meetings and for modular and prefabricated homes that can be built affordably and quickly. We propose doubling the rear extension allowance in order that elderly parents can downsize and stay close to their families. These are solutions that build communities whereas this legislation builds resentment. Let us talk about fairness. This Bill, in all its haste, refuses to recognise the lived experience of students, front-line workers or those in the rental trap through no fault of their own. It offers no flexibility and no understanding. We in Independent Ireland have been clear that in view of students’ specific housing needs, they need specific solutions. We need to expand campus building. Let us allow developers to use log cabins and prefab buildings to meet seasonal demand. This Government would rather throw a one-size-fits-none net across the country and call it reform.

While we are at it, let us talk about short-term letting. Instead of clear rules that distinguish between home shares and commercial operators, the Bill hits everyone with the same regulatory hammer. A family trying to rent a room in their home for a few weeks a year now faces bureaucracy that rivals the corporate sector, with forms, fines and enforcement, all while vacant State buildings rot in plain sight. Is that fairness? Is that common sense?

We need housing policies that incentivise development, not punish effort. Independent Ireland has proposed tax incentives to bring vacant properties back into use. We have urged the Government to reduce VAT on building materials, reform mortgage access and bring home our builders from abroad with tax reliefs and real opportunity. This Bill does none of that. Instead, it drives out small landlords, pushes out developers and paints anyone with property as an enemy of progress. That is not the issue. That is scapegoating. Where are the real reforms? The Minister has been in government for almost six months. In that time, all he has come up with is a Bill that looks like it was written on the back of a cigarette packet on Monday night or Tuesday morning. There is a hollow brass-plate name change to An Bord Pleanála, a new chairman with little or no obvious experience in the construction or planning sectors and a press release promising that an “Enhanced LDA will beef up delivery of homes across the country”. There are six key promises that appear to me to be nothing more than waffle.

While talking about waffle, I have to mention one person who spoke a lot of waffle the last two times he spoke in the Dáil, criticising Independent Ireland's policies, and that is Deputy Mattie McGrath. The same TD voted against Independent Ireland's motion on housing to hold the Government accountable. The same TD voted for the Taoiseach. The same TD voted against our proposals on NGOs. He voted with the Government to allow Deputy Michael Lowry additional speaking time. He also voted with the Government on the national framework. A man who hails himself as the so-called independent Opposition is almost more Fianna Fáil now than he ever was in his life.

He was criticising Independent Ireland's housing policies. We can stand over them. All he ever has is a blank piece of paper. We have policies and we can stand before the people with them.

John McGuinness (Carlow-Kilkenny, Fianna Fail)
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Maybe Deputy Collins can have a chat with him on a personal matter.

Michael Collins (Cork South-West, Independent Ireland Party)
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I will do my best. I cannot do any more.

Richard O'Donoghue (Limerick County, Independent Ireland Party)
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For people who do not understand it, RPZs are rent pressure zones. Where do we go? How did we get here in the first place? We got here because of a lack of infrastructure. What have we done over the past six years? I have been asking our Government to look at development-led infrastructure but what we did was that we set up Irish Water. Irish Water was set up to collect money for existing water products. It was set up to put in meters to collect money from people for the usage of water. It is now a runaway train. There is no accountability and no project is on time or in budget. What do we do to fix it? We go to people who can deliver infrastructure. When they deliver the infrastructure, they are on time and in budget. If they are not, they are out of business because they are not playing with the taxpayers' but playing with their own money. They have to deliver it so they have to make a profit. They can make a profit but we have agencies looking for millions upon millions of euro, even up to a billion euro, from the Government to create infrastructure. If we audit what they are delivering and audit them against international contractors, they deliver 50% less. The Irish taxpayer who pays money for something is not getting value. If they make a mistake, there is no accountability yet they are moved and promoted up the ladder, rather than be told to get out because they cannot do what they are meant to do. Give me somebody who will deliver.

I would like the Minister of State to look at Pallaskenry. I contacted Uisce Éireann regarding 42 houses being built in Pallaskenry to help the Government to meet its housing targets. On the website, it stated that Pallaskenry was a green flag, ready to build. We contacted Uisce Éireann and advised it we had an out-of-date letter for the 42 houses so we could deliver for the people, through the Government. I do not care who delivers them as long as the houses are there. It said it was sorry but it had to do research on the plant. This plant was delivered by a developer who is no longer developing. The 42 houses were being built for the people of the local area to meet the Government's housing target and to put roofs over people's heads.

I will tell the Minister of State how long it took to get an A4 sheet of paper on which all it had to do was change the date. It took 29 emails, 36 phone calls and eight weeks. It said it had to go back and do an analysis on the system. Everyone knows that for a sewerage system, the analysis is done on a weekly basis to know how the plant is working. However, it took that amount of administration, going through all the different layers and going around the house twice, to send us an email with an A4 sheet of paper. How does the Government expect to get delivery at that rate? How does it expect to meet its targets on that basis?

I have offered solutions before. I can stand on this side of the House and criticise all day long. I would be justified in doing that but I am also giving solutions to help the Government to meet its targets. It is one thing to stand here and criticise but another to say you have a solution. The solution here is to dissolve Uisce Éireann, give the water infrastructure back to the local authorities where we had no problems. Get developer-led infrastructure and when it is done, hand it back to the local authorities to maintain it.

Uisce Éireann cannot deliver with the money it is given. There is no accountability and no budget and that is why we are not getting delivery. I want to help the Government. Send me into any of the projects for which it has given the Government the figures and I will offer solutions. The existing plants could be modified to keep going until the Government has the money to invest in them so that we can build more houses on existing systems. I can help to deliver the project on time.

Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú)
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The past ten days have been a time of deep frustration and nearly depression among people. The omnishambles of the Government's approach to the RPZs in the past ten days has really frustrated people at home. Fianna Fáil obviously has a history in terms of the housing crisis. The Taoiseach, Deputy Micheál Martin, was a Minister in the Government that created the first bubble, a Minister in the Government that crashed housing prices around the country and now he is the Taoiseach who has led to the big spike in house prices and rents again. That incompetence has nearly been crystallised into the past ten days. There has been confusion, chaos and contradiction from the Minister and from the Government.

The story about the changes in the rent pressure zones broke last week before the Cabinet had even discussed the issue. The Government chopped and changed its plans on a daily basis. It announced the plans for next March. Landlords listening to that confusion from the Ministers concluded that they could evict their tenants now, rack up the rents before this happens and significantly increase their levels of profit. I have no doubt that the statistics will show that in this past week landlords started to move in that direction, because of the Governments plan.

Then the Government said it had planned all along to bring in this legislation this week. There was no time made available for this. To make time available, the statements on nursing homes had to be cancelled. It was complete confusion again in the Government's approach to this. The Government's approach feels like amateur hour. It is not good enough by half.

We are under so much pressure in terms of the housing crisis that we need professionalism, well thought out plans and a Government that knows what it is doing. This level of instability within the Government is in itself a cause to stop and slow down the building of homes throughout the country. I believe there are serious flaws in relation to this. There are flaws in terms of what is happening to students. It is wrong that students are going to have to go back to tenancies on an annual basis and see those rents racked up. In regard to the no-fault eviction element of this, there is a positive in that up to half the tenants will be covered. However, it strikes me as incredible that the Government is now voting for no-fault evictions when it basically threw Neasa Hourigan out of government for doing the same thing in the last Government. This shows another flip flop in terms of the Government's approach to this.

Not all people will be covered by this. There will be many people who have cancer, mothers who are pregnant and about to give birth and 80-year-old people living in tenancies who will not be covered by elements of the no-fault eviction. No doubt, some profit-motivated landlords will look to put pressure on tenants to push them out so they can increase rents. There are good and bad landlords, and good and bad tenants but this particular Bill will incentivise the bad landlords to profiteer.

We support the rolling out of these rent caps to the counties that were previously not covered. However, the whole centre part of the plan is to increase rents. That is the design of it. The Taoiseach said so openly. The Government wants to increase market activity and the only way it can see to increase market activity is to increase rents. Rents are €2,000 per month on average for a new rental agreement. That is already excessive, damaging and too high. At the core of the project is to increase rents further. That is a phenomenal so-called solution from a Government that has been involved in the housing crisis for so long.

One of the ways market activity could be increased would be to decrease VAT, to zero rate VAT for a three- or five-year period.

That would take €50,000 off the price of a house. It would bring in a lot of the builders who are not currently building. It would make it cheaper to build homes. It would increase market activity and make it easier for families to build. Representatives from Uisce Éireann were before the committee last week. I asked them how long it would take to fill the gaps in the water system that are preventing houses being built. They said they will not have those gaps filled until 2050, which is incredible. I asked the representatives An Bord Pleanála how long it takes on average to turn around an application for planning permission. They said they did not know and could not answer. I speak to builders who say it takes more than a year to turn around an application. We have 4,000 empty local authority homes. It is taking eight months to turn them around. We have 160,000 empty homes, yet the grants to refurbish them are taking forever. The Government is not doing its job. It is damaging the housing sector. It needs to cop on.

Paul Gogarty (Dublin Mid West, Independent)
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This proposal is basically to kick to touch until next March. There is no cohesive Government strategy that I can see. The Government was put in place in January. Almost six months later, we should have a proper, far-reaching plan, but we do not. We have this proposal, which no one can disagree with in the first instance, to extend the rent pressure zones across the country. I comment the Ministers for doing that much but we are not looking at the bigger picture. What type of landlords want to get out of the market? It is the smaller landlords who inherited properties and who rent them out at a reasonable price. They want no-hassle tenants who they can keep there for ten or 20 years - no bother, lower rent and everyone is happy. These people are being forced out of the market. Meanwhile, a new investment fund can come in from abroad. The Minister is saying we need to have outside investment to build houses, but these funds set the rents at the top end of the market. They are the ones who push it up. The Government's over-dependence on the HAP scheme means that the taxpayer will be footing the bill for these higher rents for years to come and for those families and individuals who have been evicted and who may find newer properties down the line. The Government is actually subsidising these funds on the double.

Many Deputies have asked why the State cannot be the single biggest construction company. It would not have to directly employ builders, but it could set up a scheme whereby it would be in charge and would have a strategic plan. In terms of targeting housing and putting certainty into the market, every housing development should be part of a strategic development zone. This would give certainty as to what communities are going to have. It would give a push to Government. These zones are not always perfect. Clonburris was not as good as Adamstown in my constituency. It would give a little bit of certainty about where areas are going to be built.

Six months ago, I mentioned a couple of things. I referred to the issue of allowing people to build in their gardens. There was some talk that the Government was going to move on that, which is very welcome.

Aside from Croí Cónaithe, which I do acknowledge has been welcome, there are still barriers to redeveloping derelict units over shops in towns and villages around the country. They could be rented out or purchased, for example where post offices and banks are closing. I still cannot see the logic whereby someone who is on a Dublin council housing list cannot move down the country, try out living there, try those better pupil-teacher ratios in schools and see if they can get a job working from home or in the local community. If they do not like it, why can they not have a five-year period on the housing list in order that they come go back to Dublin? No one is going to take a risk for a potential opportunity that would spread the load and put new homes into the market, with incentives for people who own over-the-shop properties. It would be a win-win situation for all. We do not have that. We have restrictions every step of the way.

I do not know what the legal parameters are - I would like to know - but when it comes to these investment funds coming in, why can the Government not enter into a 50-50 partnership? The Government would then get the return that could be used to purchase more properties down the line.

John Connolly (Galway West, Fianna Fail)
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It has been very interesting to observe the debate and listen to the significant criticism and disapproval on the part of Opposition Members of what the Minister is bringing forward. Those same Members then say they do not intend to vote against the measure. In a very challenging scenario, the Minister has brought balance to a situation in which it is difficult to do so. Primarily, it is to his credit that he is protecting existing tenancies. The inference, namely that existing tenants will face substantial rent increases as a result of this, is simply untrue. It is important to state that clearly, as many of my colleagues have done. There are people who have the sense that what we are doing today will have that impact. It is important to state clearly and with certainty that it is not the impact of the provisions. In fact, this will do the opposite. It will extend the rent controls and protections that tenants enjoy in certain locations at the moment to the rest of the country. It is notable that the Housing Agency review, published before the legislation came to us, found that tenants outside RPZs did face higher rent increases due to the lack of protection in those locations. The Minister is to be commended on making sure the protection of the zones is extended to all tenants throughout the country. It is also important for existing tenants to know that the terms of their tenancies will not change, despite some of the inferences that have been made.

Another thing that is really good about what is coming forward here is that from next March, each tenancy will have a duration of six years. That is very welcome. It will abolish any uncertainty that tenants and families have that a landlord could, at any point and under certain circumstances, end their tenancy. That six-year duration is timed well, and I commend the Minister. It is something that will help build communities. The sole effect of it will, of course, be to protect the family or tenant, but it will also have the impact of helping to build communities. The Minister has made efforts to balance the desire for greater security for tenants with the needs of smaller landlords who have three properties or fewer. In the event that they or their family find themselves in difficult financial circumstances, they will be able to sell the property. They will continue to be able to do that if a family member requires the home. The Opposition will claim that we are doing this to facilitate large landlords and major investors. From next March, those landlords will have no cause to evict a tenant. There will be total ban on no-fault evictions. That is commendable. Opposition Deputies know well that this is a good measure, and they will be willing to support it when it comes to the vote this evening.

Cormac Devlin (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)
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I welcome the opportunity to examine the Residential Tenancies (Amendment) Bill 2025. I thank the Minister for bringing it before the House.

This is a decisive Bill that extends rent pressure zones to every county, something that Members from all sides of the House sought. It reflects the Government's commitment to renters, to stability and fairness and to delivering real protections in an often volatile housing market. At its core, the Bill will ensure that all tenants in Ireland, whether in Donegal, Dublin, Dún Laoghaire or Drumshanbo, will be protected from excessive rent increases. Until now, rent pressure zones covered around 83% of tenancies nationwide. That still left one in five tenants outside the reach of these protections, exposed to the full force of market rent inflation. That changes now. This Bill will extend the RPZ rules to every corner of the country, applying the 2% rent cap nationally until 28 February 2026. That means renters in counties like Leitrim, Roscommon, Donegal, Clare and Mayo, areas not previously covered, will now benefit from the same safeguards as those in urban centres. That is fair and it is a necessary step. Whether you rent in Blackrock or Ballaghaderreen, your right to affordable and predictable rents should be the same.

We know these reforms are needed. The Housing Agency's review shows that tighter rent controls have helped to moderate price growth, but also that supply has been impacted, particularly following the 2021 restrictions. The challenge we face is how to protect renters without discouraging badly needed investment in our housing supply. This Bill strikes that balance. It protects tenants in the short term through nationwide RPZ coverage. It gives certainty to landlords and investors by signalling future changes will be indexed to inflation and capped. It gives renters peace of mind to know their tenancies are secure and sudden sharp increases will no longer be the norm. From 1 March 2026, the reforms will go even further. No-fault evictions will end for the majority of new tenancies, tenancies will be guaranteed for six years and rents will be linked to inflation, providing long-term stability. These are not just technical changes, but changes that will impact thousands of households, including people planning their family's future, saving for a home or just trying to get by.

We acknowledge these are complex reforms but complexity can never be an excuse for inaction. Instead, the Government must act decisively and responsibly to bring clarity, certainty and fairness to Ireland's rental sector. These changes will introduce a degree of predictability to the rental market, thereby encouraging much-needed investment in new housing units.

To those struggling to afford rent, the answer is supply and continued support from the State. We have seen the rental tax credit and HAP be increased in the past few years, and now the rent controls are being extended to the entire country. The Government is moving forward to provide certainty that will improve supply. This Bill is the first step in that strategy, with more legislation to follow. I hope it will be supported by TDs from across this House. I thank the Minister for not only having the Housing Agency review the report of the commission in May 2024 but also for his work in this area.

Micheál Carrigy (Longford-Westmeath, Fine Gael)
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I welcome this legislation. As the Chair of the housing committee, I also thank its members from all parties for waving pre-legislative scrutiny at a meeting yesterday so this Bill could be on the agenda here today and passed before the week is out. I just wanted to put that on the record.

Ultimately, this Bill is about protecting tenancies and trying to create an environment to get inward investment into the building of apartments. As Deputy Devlin said, the report of the Housing Commission was referred to the Housing Agency, and that body was tasked with coming up with recommendations on the RPZs and the best formula going forward. We had representatives of the Housing Agency before the housing committee yesterday and members put these questions to them. They asked for clarification concerning why this recommendation was put forward. The Housing Agency looked at four recommendations. I went back over the text because I feel it is important that these reasons be known. Regarding the first option, while it was felt it might encourage more supply, it would be detrimental to tenants who would experience very large increases in rent. It was felt the second option would not encourage further investment. The third option, a points-based system as used in Europe, was felt to be a system that could not be introduced here. This is why the fourth option - to expand the RPZs across the country - was the recommendation put forward by the Housing Agency, which had been charged with looking at the best system for tenants here. Ultimately, this is about having a system that will protect tenancies and create investment. Yesterday, we heard that approximately 55% of the units being built currently are being supported by the State. This is not sustainable into the future. We need to get leveraged finance from our own financial institutions, but we also need international finance coming into the country to support housing construction.

I have a few queries. Specifically regarding my area of Longford-Westmeath, the initial legislation referred to rent levels above the rental average in the State. Our rental average would be quite a bit lower compared with other counties. I would, therefore, like to query the implementation of this aspect in every county. Concerning my home county, we have a short supply of hotel accommodation and many people are doing short-term lettings. I refer to viability in this regard, if the Minister could give me an answer on these points on behalf of people in those areas.

I am delighted, however, to be able to support this legislation and will be supporting the further legislation when it comes before the Dáil in the autumn term. I also look forward to having the opportunity, along with my colleagues, to scrutinise that legislation when it comes before the housing committee.

Conor McGuinness (Waterford, Sinn Fein)
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The policy the Government is now pursuing when it comes to rent is a cynical attempt to drive rents even higher for tens of thousands of people already struggling to keep a roof over their heads. There is no denying that the Minister has chosen to side with corporate landlords, institutional investors and developers and to throw renters under the bus. I want to see RPZs - those modest protections - extended to the 17% of tenancies not currently covered. We know what will follow, however, because the Minister has told us. This one protection that renters have will be gutted and replaced with chaos. It is a reckless policy. The Minister can shake his head, but it is a reckless policy and dangerous. The Government is opening the door to a surge of evictions, especially for renters with pre-2022 Part 4 tenancies. Many of these tenancies are due to expire and what the Minister is proposing - in the round and not the Bill in front of us - gives landlords every incentive to remove tenants and jack up the rent. It gives renters little to no protection at all.

Meanwhile, the Taoiseach is wringing his hands, the Tánaiste briefs the media and the Minister seems to be scratching his head. It has been blunder after blunder all week. He botched the announcement, forgot to mention the RPZ extension at the beginning and changed the line three times in three days. One minute, he was waiting until March and the next it had always been his plan to move now. The real plan, and the only consistent thread in this mess, is to push up rents. Every single renter will be hit eventually - maybe not today but soon. The average tenancy, and the Minister knows this, lasts 3.4 years, so all this talk of six years is not fooling anybody. Anyone who moves for work, study or family reasons runs the risk of being fleeced. It is adding fuel to the fire already raging across the State. In quarter 1 of this year, as the Minister knows, average rents across the State rose by 7.3%. In County Waterford, the situation is far worse. It is far above the average, with rents having gone up by an eye-watering 12.1%.

These are not just numbers. Real people are being priced out of their communities, forced to move, forced into debt or forced into the trauma of homelessness. What happens when people are pushed out of secure housing? Well, we see it all around the State. Almost 15,500 people are officially recorded as homeless, but we know the truth is that there are many more. At the current rate, child homelessness will hit 5,000 by the end of September. It is the most visceral indicator of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael's systemic failure in housing. I would really like to know how they handle the shame of it. I do not mean to personalise it, but I would really like to know how those supporting this Government and its predecessors handle the shame of 5,000 children being homeless by the end of the summer if the trends continue, and all the signs are they will.

This approach will hammer healthcare workers, students, construction workers, gardaí, pensioners, those on HAP and those whose modest wish is that, someday, they might be able to begin putting some money away to be able to afford a home of their own. It will hand another massive pay day to vulture funds, developers and the big landlords who already dominate the rental market. Taken together, Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and some of their Independents have had 12 years to get this right. In that time, we have seen spiralling rents, broken promises and the shame of increasing homelessness. It is time to say "Enough". While I welcome the extension of the RPZs, the Minister should leave it at that. It is enough. Let that be the positive move this Government makes and do not hollow out those modest protections any further.

Mattie McGrath (Tipperary South, Independent)
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I, too, am glad to be able to speak on this Bill. I am as confused as many others. We have a desperate housing crisis that we have failed to tackle. We have debate in this House. We have ideology, really, coming from the left and a lack of solutions coming from the centre, which I have always been proud to represent, and the Government parties. Panic has set in. I wish the Minister and the Ministers of State well in this endeavour, but I honestly think we have lost our way. We should not be talking about RPZs here, although there is a need for them in many areas.

Instead, we should be talking about the pressure cooker that is the lack of housing for the young and not so young - many of them are quite old - and the inability to solve the housing crisis. I know it is not simple. I have no ideological hang-up about foreign investment and foreign banks being involved. We need that kind of leverage. The previous speaker mentioned that almost 48% of houses had some Government involvement. That is not sustainable. If we go back to Seán Lemass and how we built houses in those years, we had no AI, none of the geniuses and none of the degrees coming out of their ears that we talk about now. We had plain, common sense and hard graft. We mentioned builders, such as Michael Hally Construction in Ardfinnan. I am sure the Ceann Comhairle had many of them in her constituency. There were many other contractors as well. They employed hundreds of men. Indeed, my late dad was a small contractor and built some houses. Deputy McGuinness might like to know that some of those houses were in Waterford County Council, while others were in Tipperary County Council. He did this as a small set-up and self-employed man. He was able to build those houses for the Land Commission. That is not today or yesterday. It is so difficult now, however. We have completely tied ourselves in red tape, hobby-horses and other views.

We probably had too much zoned land. The previous Government, of which Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael were part of, appointed a new Office of the Planning Regulator. We never had one before and I do not know if we ever needed one. It is like all the quangos we set up now. They are big organisations with nice, fancy offices and brass plates of their own. It is quango land. The Planning Regulator overstepped his mark completely. Tipperary County Council, of which my daughter is a councillor for the Cahir district, had 60 acres of zoned land and the Planning Regulator put it down to ten acres. The councillors are now grappling with ideas after being told by management that it wants to rezone some of that land again. This is only in the past two years. We are going to have to contravene the development plans that are all made. That is unnecessary bureaucracy that was brought in and resulted in confusion reigning. While there was a need for planning regulation, he went off on a tangent dezoning all this land. Whatever he thought that was going to get him, I do not know. It is a mess; nothing short of it. I do not know how he feels now when the Minister speaks about zoning land. He made his name de factoby this policy and by being a tough man who was going to teach all the councils a lesson by dezoning all of this land. In the past, councils could do what they liked but the Planning Regulator has overruled the whole lot. That was a big mistake. Is he going to be relieved of his post and that office stood down? Obviously, if we are going to completely change policy and rezone more land, it fundamentally makes his position untenable. That is one issue.

Another issue is Uisce Éireann. Most of the towns and villages I know are at capacity. They do not have the funds. These things are costing too much. Uisce Éireann is not fit for purpose. It was set up by elements of Fine Gael under Phil Hogan. It has been an unmitigated disaster. Uisce Éireann is not interested in local knowledge or talking to local people, including the workers who worked for councils for decades and now work for Uisce Éireann. It does not want to listen. It knows it all. That is a bad thing for anyone in any job to say he or she knows it all.

The Government has made the standards of houses unattainable. In actual fact, the standards are unhealthy. I am not a scientist or a medical person but those standards are unhealthy. That have locked up all the people who have gone to work and there is not a breeze going through them. That is fine for private houses if they want, but the Government has decided to have the BER rating. I am looking forward to having an engagement with the Minister at another forum very soon about this issue. Although the Minister can correct me, what I heard from the Cabinet was that the Minister was going to tell councils to ignore the BER stuff and to prioritise getting housed fixed. There is only €11,000 available to take back each void. An amount of €11,000 will not do the windows, doors and insulation, never mind a full retrofit. There is not a smell or hope of that. With regard to the costs of everything, Government policies, especially the carbon tax, have driven up the cost of insulation and meddled with the rising price of oil, which is about to rise again because of what is happening outside of our control. And then there are the BER ratings.

I did not believe the story a man told me when he came to me from Contae Phórt Láirge - Deputy McGuinness’ constituency - approximately seven years ago. He was a single sole trader delivering coal and briquettes and he provided a great service to ordinary people. He explained to me that he was being put out of business. When I asked him what was wrong, he explained that any house that goes back to Waterford County Council, such as when a person dies, the keys go back or for whatever reason, the first thing the council does is block the chimney. That is utter madness. A lot of measures have been brought in. I know we have to heat our houses and not be wasting all of it through chimneys, but we have gone over the top ridiculously. Taking out chimneys is shocking. During the snowstorm last year, people could not boil the kettle in these modern houses. The Ceann Comhairle is not as old as I am. I remember the half doors on many houses. Plenty of fresh air flowed through the houses, yet people lived, had families and survived. They were not frozen with the cold or at the doctor every day sick either. We have lost our way in many areas.

Regarding the whole situation of short-term lets, such as Airbnb, we are going to wipe out an industry. It is an industry. I call it the cottage industry mainly. Many people have farm houses. There are a number of them quite close to me. They are derelict. Big families were raised in them. Nine people went to the school in the morning in the one I am talking about. There was nine of them on the same road. They were a fine family. They are all married and moved off and the farmer has a new house on the land. There is a lovely, thatched house there, which is doing a great job. It is pretty busy. He did it lovely. There are two things in this regard. First, the council decided – I tipped him off at the time because I was on the council – that thatched houses were going to be on the register. That meant that you could not do anything with them and just had to maintain them, but the councils did not give any grants for that maintenance. While they might have given a couple of hundred of euro, that would not pay the thatcher for two days. The lovely restoration of many old farm houses and other houses is at risk. People are petrified. The Government thinks there is a magic wand and that it is going to get a massive supply of houses, but it will not. People will not give them up. They are going to let them go back into disrepair again. That is the rock the Government is going to perish on. Although some people claim otherwise, there is not a magic figure.

Regarding bedsits, I remember there was a big furore in this Chamber, maybe from the left again, about bedsits being terrible because there was only one bed. There was a roof over people’s heads. There were a thousand of them in this city alone. Bedsits were wiped out overnight with a piece of legislation. Many of those people were made homeless as a result. I asked the question whether they were better off in the bedsit, albeit a small, cramped one with everything in the one room? They were happy there and people were happy to provide that service to them. Bedsits were banned because we had to be so upright with all these standards. We could not have these dastardly things anymore. We have to get real and crawl before we walk.

I was raised in a house of nine, including my mother and father, thank God. Three or four workmen were in the house every day. People lived in cramped conditions. When my parents got married, they lived in a room in someone else’s house. Now, however, we want a magic wand to get rid of all the people who supplied those bedsits, the Airbnb and the short-term lets. We are going against what the Government is aiming to do, that is, provide houses for people. The left hand does not know what the right hand is doing. As far as I am concerned, we have too many advisers and too many people on every radio show and everything else who claim to know everything about housing and how to house people and what to do.

There are basic things we need to do. We must go back to basics. Instead of this Bill, we should treat this as a housing emergency and go back to the State providing houses by stimulating contractors. I am talking about the big REITs and the big outside people who came in and bought all the properties. We should tax the hell out of them because they have done nothing only destroy people. Rather, we should stimulate the local contractor and deal with the planning laws. We should tell the Planning Regulator to take a holiday or send him out to do some other job in the Middle East for two or three years so that we can go back to the basics. We need to keep the zoned land we had. What did rezoning land do? It meant that the land that was left zoned saw higher costs. Kindergarten children would not do this.

We have to call in the Secretaries General of the Departments because they are and should be accountable. They have not been accountable across the board. A couple of years ago, a Secretary General was asked to move from one Department to another. He kicked up and got an extra €60,000. Secretaries General are well paid. They should be accountable. They are the Accounting Officers as well as everything else. They are not accountable currently for costs, waste and the fact that there are voids and everything else and many other issues. We see how we cannot build the children’s hospital.

We do not have a light rail network. We do not have a transport link to the airport, and God knows how many more things. How could we do all of this stuff back in the era of Lemass? There was the likes of T. K. Whitaker and visionaries in those Departments. Now all little fiefdoms have built up and people are all watching their jobs, promotions and space. Governments come and go but they are still there - the permanent government.

If we were serious, we would wipe VAT off houses. Between VAT, planning charges, fees to Irish Water and road charges for anyone building their own house, it is more than half the cost of the house. We would get houses built if we had common sense. We cannot build houses by taxing the people.

There are at least 20 couples in my constituency, some of whom are farmer’s sons and some of whom are not, who have sites and a reasonable amount of savings for a deposit but they cannot get planning because of this, that and the other, and An Taisce and other bodies are sticking their oar in as well. We have all these well-heeled organisations that are wreaking havoc. It is a case of “I’m all right, Jack” and of pulling up the ladder on everybody else.

Go back to basics and put away some of these grandiose powers and call it an emergency. Get rid of VAT and these taxes, not forever but for five years. Do something meaningful.

What happened with the mica? The big businesses - the Minister knows who I am talking about - the block companies or the cement companies should have paid the money there. We added 5% to the price of concrete. What does that do? It automatically adds to the price for everyone putting in a foundation and doing plastering. It is on every bag of cement you buy. We have all these big plans but we forget the little things. If we thought of all the little things, went back to basics and got it sorted, it would be a big help.

We have a great man in Tipperary County Council, the newly appointed director of services for housing, Jonathan Cooney. For a long time, I was the chair of a voluntary housing association, Caislean Nua voluntary housing, but I am the vice chair now. We built 14 lovely houses. We had a public meeting after the horrific beating of a man of 95 years of age. Thank God he is alive. We decided that rather than curse the dark, we would light a candle. We were told we would not be able to build these houses but we negotiated with the council and got the site. Some 11 lay people, not one engineer, not one architect or not one solicitor, built 14 houses. We had to hire all those advisers but we built them. Thankfully, we did it in about two years even though we were told it would take five years. The council was building in the same field and there were four winters with houses with no roofs on them, with contractors going bust and everything else.

Support the ordinary basic assisted housing associations rather than the many big conglomerates that have grown up. There are around 300 of them around the country building 14 or 15 houses. If every parish built ten to 17 houses, that would make a nice dent and the elderly would be happy in their own villages. However, now most villages cannot do that because the sewerage infrastructure is at capacity. When I was going to school, a septic tank was built and it is still there. It is at capacity now and we cannot build anything else.

Councillor Máirín McGrath and her group Positive Steps want to build a special unit for adult children with disabilities but they are caught. They cannot do anything. They have a willing developer and a site but there is no capacity in the sewerage infrastructure. They cannot do anything; their hands are tied behind their backs. We are blindfolded and we muzzled as well. That is the problem we have to break - the red tape, the bureaucracy and the legions of NGOs. Many of the NGOs are costing the State a fortune and are getting their oars in as well. All the fellows with brass plates outside their offices are pushing paper.

When building those houses, the late TD Noel Davern helped us out, and I will never forget when he phoned me to say we had been approved for the money. A couple of stages had to go through the Department. After that, it went to seven different places, between the county council, the Departments of the environment and housing and different offices. It went through all those stages, back and forward, pushing paper. I think that has been cut to about three but it is still way too slow. The council will send something but it will take three to six months for the Department to look at it. It then goes back to the council. It goes up and down and around the houses like the man on the radio years ago who said "Round the house and mind the dresser". I forget his name but he was a great presenter on the radio. That is what is going on and we cannot build the houses.

We are spending and gobbling up the money on all those things. We have created quango after quango. Every time I see something here a new office is set up or a new outfit is set up. Trim down the outfits, cut away the waste and allow the councils to do it. They did it in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. The madness came in during the 1990s and in the boom and we got bad buildings. They were very bad buildings and we still have them. With all the regulation and all the standards, we are still getting bad buildings and defective buildings. How can we allow the children’s hospital scandal to go on for this length of time? We need a total re-evaluation.

I am sure there are visionaries like T. K. Whitaker and people in the Minister's vein. I know they have some good ideas, they are interested and they want to make a difference. How many housing Ministers have we had? How many housing Ministers have stood here and said they were going to build so many houses? It is not happening because it is convoluted and we are convulsed with paperwork, architects and design artists. If the county council decided it wanted to build four houses in my village tonight, it would have to go to tender for architects. Surely to God it could have a template for a four-house scheme and it could apply to all the villages. They would have to tweak it to the sites but why do we have to have all that bureaucracy, the appointment of architects and all these stages? We have lost our way.

We need to open our eyes and ears and cut out the regulators and all the regulations. I am not saying to build things without council planning - of course, we have to have planning – but we have tied ourselves up in knots. All the well-meaning things we are doing here will not do it.

We have the left ferociously opposed to the views of the landlords but we need to come together, the whole lot of us. Ní neart go cur le chéile. This is too serious. I heard another Deputy attacking me a while ago saying I never had a policy paper. I have had plenty of policies and I have done the work with other people. I could not do it on my own. They are not even listening to that because they are going nowhere. We need to sit down together on the housing committee. I was on the housing committee for five years but honest to God, I ran off it because if talk and debates would built houses, we would not be short a house. We need action. The time for the words is over. We need common sense above all else.

An focal scoir. Many small, ordinary landlords tell me they are out of the game. What we will be doing with this legislation taking away so many houses beforehand. The magic thing might happen afterwards, or it might not work, but they will flee the market and that is what we do not want. We have the experience with the bedsits. We wiped out a thousand of them with one piece of legislation or a statutory instrument. We thought it was a great idea. People were living in these bedsits. People would be far better off living in those bedsits - many people were so happy in them – than being out on the street, with Fr. Peter McVerry or wherever.

It is time to refocus. That is why it would probably take a national government, although that is not going to happen. We need national imaginative focused development. The Government should start by cutting VAT and taxes and try to accept it is an emergency rather than talking about it. It should try to do something to build houses and allow the people who can build their own houses to build them. They are being nobbled and stopped.