James Browne (Wexford, Fianna Fail)
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I move: "That the Bill be now read a Second Time."

On 27 January 2026, the Government approved the publication of the Residential Tenancies (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2026. This Bill will amend the current system of rent controls significantly and provide new measures to protect tenants, including a no-fault eviction ban for larger landlords, reduced grounds for smaller landlords and stronger security of tenure. It will come into effect for new tenancies from 1 March 2026. We want to provide certainty, clarity and stability for the rental sector. Cabinet approved the introduction of amendments to rental controls to come into effect on 1 March 2026, immediately following the expiration of rent pressure zones.

These decisions have been informed by the findings of the Housing Agency review of rent pressure zones. These showed the existing rules were restricting supply and potential policy options. There is also the agency’s preferred recommendation to modify the existing operation of the current rent controls. This followed comprehensive examination by the Housing Agency and stakeholder engagement. The approved policy measures aim to boost investment in the supply of homes available for rent and to keep existing landlords in the market. The changes agreed will also provide significantly stronger tenancy protections and are finely balanced between the interests of tenants and the need for further private investment in the rental market across the country, taking account of stakeholder engagement.

A new national rent control will ensure that annual rent increases across the country will be capped at 2% or the rate of inflation. Unless a no-fault eviction occurs, we will allow rents for new tenancies created on or after 1 March 2026 to be set at market value but in return for far greater security of tenure through tenancies of minimum duration of six years for most tenants. We will continue to restrict the annual rent increases in line with inflation but linked to the consumer price index, CPI, and retain the 2% cap.

The Government recognises that rents are already too high. We simply need more rental accommodation, however, and in particular apartments, to tackle the high rents in this country by increasing supply. This is why we are allowing the rents for new apartments to be linked to the CPI, even when inflation exceeds 2%. Landlords will be allowed to reset rent for new tenancies and between future tenancies. The resetting of rents to market rent will only be allowed in respect of a new tenancy created on or after 1 March 2026 but not after a no-fault eviction. Where such a new tenancy lasts for over six years, the landlord will be allowed to reset rent to market rent at the end of each six-year period. We do not want rents for long-term tenancies to fall behind market rents. The current rent pressure zone rent controls are out of kilter with international practice in this regard.

Along with the ability to reset rents, the Bill will introduce enhanced tenancy protections for all new tenancies that begin on or after 1 March 2026. These changes will have a significant impact for our rental sector. There is a very fine balance to be struck. We aim to attract investment, but we know that both tenants and landlords deserve and need fair treatment. We aim for tenancy protections that at their core are meaningful and fair. We know that introducing stronger tenancy protections will need more and better enforcement. Therefore, the programme for Government, Securing Ireland's Future, commits to continuing its support for renters. This includes measures to protect renters and landlords from abusive practices by enhancing the enforcement powers of the Residential Tenancies Board, RTB.

It is important for both landlords and tenants that disputes are resolved as early as possible and that parties to the dispute consider the process transparent and reflective of our rental law. The RTB is working to ensure that process improvements continue to be implemented to ensure that disputes raised by landlords and tenants are dealt with promptly and efficiently and, more broadly, to ensure the effective regulation of the rental market. Exchequer funding allocation of €22.8 million for the RTB's operational services has been secured for 2026. This is a 70% increase on its initial 2025 allocation. This will enable the RTB to effectively manage increases in its demand-led services and additional remit as a result of the changes proposed in the Bill.

The Bill should be viewed as having an important role in driving supply and as part of the Government's broad commitments and efforts to meet our housing demand. 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. Increasing the supply of new homes is critical to alleviating pressures in the housing market, helping to moderate price growth and easing affordability challenges across the country. In this regard, supply has increased significantly over the last five years, with more than 161,300 new homes delivered since July 2020.

The Central Statistics Office, CSO, New Dwelling Completions report for quarter 4 of 2025 shows that a total of 36,284 new dwellings were completed in 2025, representing a 20.4% increase on the same period in the previous year. This marks the highest number of completions recorded in any given year since the CSO began recording this data series in 2011. Over the last five years, 148,995 new homes have been delivered. This compares with 83,267 in the previous five-year period from 2016 to 2020, and just 29,217 in the five years before that from 2011 to 2015. One key indicator of progress is the delivery of new apartments. Encouragingly, after a very significant drop-off in apartment delivery in 2024, the CSO figures show a 38.7% increase in the delivery of apartments in 2025 compared with 2024, with more than 12,000 apartments completed. This is the highest completions figure for apartments since the CSO began collating this dataset in 2011.

The Government’s new plan, Delivering Homes, Building Communities 2025-2030: An Action Plan on Housing Supply and Targeting Homelessness, was launched on 14 November 2025. Building on the foundations of Housing for All and informed by the work of the Housing Commission, this plan will empower the State, partners and the private sector to continue to play a critical part in delivery. This plan is being enabled by the largest ever capital investment in the history of the State, €275 billion over ten years, to significantly upgrade our infrastructure and make the environment for building homes much better. Direct funding for housing will also be at record levels. In 2026 alone, over €9 billion in capital funding will be provided through the Exchequer, the Land Development Agency, LDA, and the Housing Finance Agency, HFA.

The fundamental difference from Housing for All is the greater emphasis in this plan on creating the environment for delivering more homes. This plan enables others, particularly the private sector, to play their part. A significantly greater supply of housing can be achieved through a balanced approach, focused on both directly supporting people to have a home of their own but also creating the best conditions possible for the industry to build more homes for people. Where necessary, the Government is also removing barriers in the legal and planning systems, regulation and procurement. We will free up the private sector to provide homes at much greater scale by providing more zoned and serviced land for housing right across the country.

The Government has delivered a revised national planning framework, enabling the zoning of significantly more land. Apartment standards have been revised and the VAT rate on the sale of new completed apartments reduced. All of these measures make apartment building more viable and rental accommodation will come on stream.

The Government will lead with record investment and strong direction, but the necessary housing can only be delivered at scale in partnership with local authorities, the LDA, approved housing bodies and the private sector. We will measure delivery and publish data, recording delivery by each of our partners. The housing crisis affects all of our society and the economy and we will continue to work with others to benefit everybody.

Increasing the supply of new homes is key to addressing many of the challenges in the housing market and rental sector. The Government is committed to delivering more homes, to doing it quickly and for more people. The programme for Government aims to ramp up the delivery of homes right across this country, to increase supply further and deliver another 300,000 new homes between 2025 and 2030. The rental sector will grow and this is an important part of that supply. We are determined to deliver the homes people need, whether that is one-off rural homes, whether it is in our villages, our towns or our cities and whether it is social, affordable, rental for purchase or private. We are determined to get those homes delivered right across the country. Our plan is already starting to show. It is showing momentum with a significant increase in housing delivery. We have seen an increase in planning permissions in the third quarter and an increase in commencements in December of last year as well. We will deliver the homes people need in this country.

John Cummins (Waterford, Fine Gael)
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The Minister has outlined the broad thrust of the Bill and I am now going to focus specifically on its provisions.

The Bill contains 31 sections. Sections 1, 3, 4 and 25 contain standard provisions dealing with the definitions, Short Title, commencement, collective citations and construction of the Bill.

Sections 2, 9 and 23 provide for the repeal of the RPZ provisions and make consequential technical amendments.

Section 5 clarifies that notices and other documents may be served or given by electronic means under the Residential Tenancies Act 2004, the principal Act.

Section 6 requires a landlord to serve a notice on a tenant and copy the RTB, explaining how the rent was set upon the commencement of a new tenancy created on or after 1 March 2026.

Section 7 obliges a tenant to allow viewings of a dwelling where the landlord intends to sell.

Section 8 provides for a new national rent control in respect of new tenancies, that is, first-time tenancies between parties, created on or after 1 March, 2026. Provision is made for an annual rent increase restriction in line with the consumer price index or, if lower, 2% per annum pro rata for both new and existing tenancies. However, a restriction linked to the CPI only will apply for new apartments and student-specific accommodation that both commenced and completed development in compliance with the building control regulations on or after 10 June 2025. From 1 March 2026, a new exemption from the annual rent increase restriction is provided for the first rent setting for a new tenancy in an existing rented dwelling after a tenant ends their tenancy where the tenant breaches the tenancy obligations or where the accommodation is no longer suitable to the accommodation needs of the tenant household. In respect of a new tenancy created on or after 1 March 2026, after six years, or three years in respect of student-specific accommodation during which the rent increase restriction applied to that tenancy, a landlord may reset the rent to market rent.

Section 10 requires a landlord when notifying their tenant of new rent to copy the notice to the RTB. Landlords must in setting the rent have regard to a newly published register by the RTB and the most recent comparable rents for similar dwellings with regard to floor area, dwelling type, number of bedrooms and bed spaces and the BER. Contravention by a landlord of the amended section 22(2) will be an offence and improper conduct and the RTB may prosecute or sanction such contravention.

Section 11 updates the definition of market rent by requiring, in setting a rent for a dwelling, regard to be given to the rent information contained in the public register.

Section 12 requires a smaller landlord, that is, a landlord that is not a company and is a landlord under not more than three tenancies of dwellings, when terminating a new tenancy created on or after 1 March 2026, that is, a tenancy of minimum duration during or after its six-year term, to make certain statutory declarations. A technical amendment allows engineers to certify for the purposes of grounding a tenancy termination on substantial refurbishment or renovation that vacant possession is required for at least three weeks for the health and safety of the tenant.

Section 13 provides that where a smaller landlord wishes to terminate a tenancy of minimum duration during its six-year term on the ground that the dwelling is needed for occupation by a family member, the termination can only be grounded in respect of the intended occupation of the landlord's spouse, civil partner, child, stepchild, foster child, adopted child, parent, step-parent or parent in-law. The smaller landlord must make a statutory declaration that the landlord is not a company and is a landlord under not more than three tenancies of a dwelling. Where a smaller landlord wishes to terminate a tenancy of minimum duration during its six-year term on the ground that the landlord intends to sell the dwelling, the landlord must make a statutory declaration that on the date the notice of termination is served, the landlord is not a company and is a landlord under not more than three tenancies of dwellings and that the landlord requires the sale proceeds to avoid undue financial or other hardship. Where the smaller landlord wishes to terminate a tenancy of minimum duration on ground 5, that is, substantial refurbishment or renovation, or ground 6, which is change of use, at the end of a six-year tenancy of minimum duration, a statutory declaration will be required to be made by a smaller landlord that on the date the notice of termination is served, the landlord is not a company and that the landlord is under not more than three tenancies of dwellings. A declaration and statement will also be required to be made by a smaller landlord that the notice period in the related notice of termination served during the tenancy of minimum duration expires on a specified termination date that falls on or after the expiry of a six-year tenancy of minimum duration.

Section 14 restricts the termination of certain tenancies by certain landlords. During a six-year tenancy of minimum duration, a smaller landlord will be permitted to terminate a tenancy where a dwelling is needed for the occupation by the landlord of a family member restricted, as I have said, to immediate family. It will also be permitted to avoid undue financial or other hardship, that is, where the sale and proceeds are required by the landlord to provide a principal private residence for the landlord or a spouse or civil partner of the landlord where the landlord or civil partner or spouse of the landlord is legally required to discharge a debt or to make payment of more than 15% of the asking price within nine months of the termination date, including a payment to the Revenue Commissioners, for example to discharge a debt under the fair deal scheme or to make a payment in respect of a tax liability; where a personal insolvency practitioner has been appointed to the landlord, spouse or civil partner of the landlord; or where at least one of those parties is bankrupt or subject to proceedings of the declaration of bankruptcy or is arranging a debtor or has made a composition of arrangement with creditors. At the end of the six-year tenancy of minimum duration, a smaller landlord may terminate a tenancy on any of the limited grounds for termination under the principal Act, subject to making any necessary statutory declaration and statement. A larger landlord will no longer be able to use the grounds for termination under paragraphs 3, 4, 5 or 6 of the table in section 34 of the principal Act and can only gain vacant possession where the tenant voluntarily leaves or breaches their obligations or where the dwelling is no longer suitable to the accommodation needs of the tenant household.

Section 15 requires the landlord when terminating a non-Part 4 tenancy to state the reason for its termination. Resetting to market rent is only allowed following a termination by a tenant or by a landlord grounded on breach of tenant obligations or where the dwelling no longer suits the accommodation needs of the tenant household. Technical amendments are made, including an update to 90 days from 28 days for the period of dispute to be referred to the RTB in relation to the validity of a notice of termination where it was served for reasons other than a breach of tenancy obligations by the landlord.

Sections 16 to 18, inclusive, update the requirement for the RTB to maintain the residential tenancies register and require the RTB to confirm for a tenant whether their landlord was a smaller landlord on the date of the notice being served.

5 o’clock

The published register will now be required to include the rent, the tenancy registration number, the tenancy commencement date, the number of bed spaces, the local electoral area in which the dwelling is situated, the floor area where applicable, and the BER, in addition to the number of bedrooms and the dwelling type for individual rented dwellings across the country.

Section 19 requires the following particulars in the application to register a tenancy with the RTB: number of bed spaces, floor area and, where applicable, the BER.

Sections 20 to 22, inclusive, provide for data sharing between the RTB and the Minister for Social Protection, the Revenue Commissioner, and the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland.

Section 24 provides a contravention to section 22(2) of the principal Act relating to rent review requirement as improper conduct by a landlord which may be investigated and sanctioned by the RTB.

Part 3 provides for amendments to the Civil Law (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 2022 to provide that a dwelling that is or was required to be registered as a tenancy under the Residential Tenancies Act since 4 March 2022 is not eligible for the accommodation recognition payment, ARP. Also, only owners of the dwellings may apply for the ARP.

I will deal with the last piece, with your indulgence, a Leas-Cheann Comhairle. Part 4 provides for technical amendments to maintain the pre-existing planning provisions for short-term letting following the repeal under this Bill of the RPZ legislation.

This Bill provides a finely balanced provision between protecting tenants and encouraging existing landlords and also encouraging new private investment into the rental market. I commend it to the House.

Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein)
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The rip-off rent hike Bill before us today is without doubt the most profound change to the regulation of the private rental sector in over a decade. Much more significant than that, at the core of this Bill, is nothing short of a vicious financial assault on private renters who are already living in the most expensive and insecure form of housing in the State. The consequence of this legislation over a relatively short period of time will be significantly increased financial hardship for renters; more and more people locked out of an overpriced private rental sector, forced to move back in with their parents, or indeed emigrate; and, crucially, significant increases in homelessness, plus family homelessness, including children. That is what is actually being proposed here today.

At the very heart of this legislation is a profound transformation in how rents are set - the market reset. As the Minister knows, the current rule is when one tenant moves out and another tenant moves in, the new rent is based on inflation or 2%, whichever is the lower. What is being proposed here from the beginning of March is that when one tenant moves out and another tenant moves in, at the start of the tenancy, in the overwhelming majority of cases, a landlord will be able to reset the rent to market rent. While RPZs will continue over the next six years, at the end of that six-year tenancy if the tenant remains, market reset will happen again. What this means is that from 1 March, thousands upon thousands of renters are going to be hit by the market reset.

What is the average length of a tenancy currently in the private rental sector? It is three and a half years according to the Residential Tenancies Board. A quarter of all tenancies registered annually are new first-time tenancies. What that means is that if those two trends continue, within a matter of months up to 60,000 tenancies could be affected each and every single year. Within four to six years the overwhelming majority of private renters in this State will be captured by the market reset rule. That is what the Minister is proposing. He will not explain it properly to people. He will not be straight with renters but that is what he is proposing.

The big question this Government wants to hide from is how much extra this is going to cost those renters? If you make a very simple calculation using the data from the Residential Tenancies Board of new and existing rents, the average additional rent to be charged by a renter captured by the market reset in a year would be €3,000. That is €3,000 extra in rent that the Minister is imposing on those renters.

In fact, because the RPZs have had a bigger effect outside Dublin, the impact in the first year alone will be an extra €3,500 in rent. In Galway city, where the gap is the largest, the Minister is proposing to allow landlords to charge up to an additional €4,500 in rent a year for a new first-time tenancy commencing in March onwards. I do not understand how the Minister and the Minister of State can describe that as fair or balanced. I will say it again: what that means is that within the course of 12 months, up to 60,000 tenancies - many more renters in those tenancies - will be paying thousands upon thousands of extra euro in rent each year. Many of them will be first-time renters in September. The majority of students live in the mainstream private rental sector and not student-specific accommodation. They are going to be hit very hard. If that is not a vicious assault on renters in the private rental sector, I do not know what is. It is the death knell of the most modest and ill-conceived rent pressure zone regulation that I can imagine but one for which renters are going to pay dearly.

The Minister will of course say that tenants who remain in their existing tenancies will not be impacted but what that ignores is the level of churn in the private rental sector. It also ignores the very difficult decisions that renters are now going to face because of this change. Will they put off having children? Will they put off taking up a job or educational opportunity? Will they have to continue to live in inadequate, overcrowded and unsuitable accommodation for fear of paying those extra rents? That is the real choice the Minister, Deputy Browne, and his Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, and Independent colleagues in government are forcing on renters.

To make matters even worse, the Minister is proposing a level of complexity both in rent setting and tenure rules that is just perplexing. There are going to be five different sets of rent-setting rules. How anybody thinks that is a credible form of rent regulation is beyond me. There will be four different sets of tenure rules. I accept that tenants in properties owned by larger landlords will have increased security of tenure but security of tenure is no damn good if you cannot afford the rent. The Minister is giving with one hand while he is taking away - with a gut punch - with the other.

This is really hard to explain to people. Even the Minister of State, Deputy Cummins, struggled to generate any level of understanding while reading his script. It is going to be much harder to understand and virtually impossible to enforce. The Residential Tenancies Board is already struggling with the significant caseload that it has, and the level of complexity and confusion being proposed here is going to make the board's job much more difficult.

For the percentage of landlords out there who will break the rules or play fast and loose with the rules, this will make their job much easier. Of course, none of this should surprise us. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have an incredibly bad track record when it comes to regulating the private rental sector. They blocked rent certainty in 2015. They made a mess of rent caps in 2016. Over the past decade they have introduced a dizzying array of changes to the Residential Tenancies Act. They ended the ban on no-fault evictions in 2023. That is the reason our private rental sector is so damn dysfunctional. It is because of those parties and their bad policies.

The Bill before us today is no different. Their rent-setting proposals have been sharply criticised by tenants' advocates. The tenure rules are being opposed by small and medium sized landlords. It appears that even some builders are unhappy with the proposals. That begs the question: why has the Minister done this? Why is this even in front of us today? The answer is very simple - it is because Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, along with their Independent supporters, have been captured by the big institutional investors. The funds lobbied aggressively for the market reset and when the funds tell Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael to jump, their parties ask "How high?" That is exactly what has happened in this instance. The tragedy of this is that they have been sold a pup. Contrary to what the Minister claims, this legislation is not going to see a significant increase in investment or in the delivery of private rental sector homes. I accept we will get some increase in high-end, high-density, high-rental accommodation in parts of Dublin and maybe the docklands of Cork but it is not going to increase the supply of social, affordable or privately owned homes and it is certainly not going to reduce rents in the short, medium or long term.

The only guarantee from this legislation is rip-off rents are going to be hiked ever higher for an ever greater number of renters, many of whom cannot afford them.

Of course, there is an alternative. The Minister should be here in front of us today introducing legislation to cut and freeze rents, introducing budgets to dramatically increase and accelerate the delivery of social and genuinely affordable homes and supporting proposals from Sinn Féin and others to activate the small and medium-sized private residential development sector to deliver more good quality homes for working people to buy but, instead, he is shafting renters and lining the pockets of big institutional investors and large corporate landlords.

For the Minister not even to acknowledge the dramatic impact that the market reset is going to have on tens of thousands of renters is, quite frankly, not only dishonest but shameful. On those grounds, the fact that, because institutional investors have demanded it of him, he is going to allow 60,000 renters pay thousands of euro extra in rent every year is the reason we will oppose this Bill, today, tomorrow and every other day in the short time he is giving us to deal with it here in the Oireachtas.

Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein)
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While most people are handing over more and more of their wages in rent and mortgage payments, other people are making an absolute fortune out of the misery of the housing crisis. For those people, this is not a crisis; this is a cash cow. For the banks, corporate landlords, investment funds and large developers, the housing crisis is not something to fix; it is something to feed off. It is something to keep alive at all costs. Those powerful interests want to squeeze every drop out of ordinary workers and this legislation is proof positive of that fact. The Government are the middle men for the vested interests. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael's rent hike Bill will allow vulture funds and big landlords to hike up rents to over 60,000 people every year. This will mean people paying thousands of euro more in rent from 1 March.

This Bill is about increasing rents - plain and simply. Everything else is window dressing and Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael and their band of Independents know this. They are making sure that the gravy train stays on the tracks and that the money keeps flowing upwards.

This is the second time in the past few months that the Government has reached into the pockets of ordinary people to give more money to those profiting from the crisis. It handed out massive tax cuts to developers for apartments that were being built. We are talking about hundreds of millions of euro that should have been given back to workers. Instead, the Government shoved it into the pockets of developers. The largest developers are currently boasting gross profit margins of over 20%. Even after all their executive salaries and all their bonuses, they still absolutely smashed their profit targets and the Government gave them more tax cuts. When workers look at their payslips and wonder how they are going to make it stretch and how they are going to afford the rent, they should know that tax cuts that should have been theirs ended up in the pockets of developers and landlords.

The Government does not stop there. It is not just about jacking up rents or handing out millions of euro of tax breaks; it is also making renters live in smaller and darker apartments. The Government wants corporate landlords to be able to charge thousands of euro a month for apartments that are just bigger than two car parking spaces.

It is glaringly obvious whose side the Government is on. We do not have to look too hard to find out that it is on the side of the big landlords, the developers who were handed the tax breaks, the landlords that are getting bigger tax breaks, the investors that pay no tax at all on their rental income and the banks that do not pay a penny tax, but renters, by God, are the ones that are going to have to pay under the legislation because the Government thinks that they need to pay more. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are never going to solve the housing crisis because they are on the side of those people getting rich off the backs of hard-pressed people - plain and simple. The only way to fix this housing crisis is to take on the vested interests, to invest in public housing and not to keep on bowing down to those same vested interests.

We need to end this rip-off for once and for all. We need to ban rent increases. That is the legislation that the Minister should be bringing before this House - legislation that Deputy Ó Broin has drafted. The Minister should be making sure that rents are affordable. That is the legislation that he should be bringing before the House, not this shameful legislation that will jack up rents on tens of thousands of households right across this State every single year from 1 March onwards. This rent hike Bill needs to be stopped in its tracks.

Thomas Gould (Cork North-Central, Sinn Fein)
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This is another example of legislation being rushed through so the Minister appears to be taking action instead of simply taking action.

Just two weeks ago, I sat on the housing committee where we dealt with dozens of typos in the planning Bill. This is legislation that has been enacted but that was also rushed through. We in the Opposition warned about the problems with rushing through legislation with mistakes and the Government still has not learned.

This Bill is not about renters. It is actually about the opposite of renters. This Bill should be called the "Investor Speculator Bill", because that is what it really is. It does not set out to protect tenants. The Minister made a point about the security of tenure. That is no good if people cannot afford the rent.

I will set out some facts to explain to him what is going on. In Cork, renters are facing an increase of €278 per month. In County Cork, it is €308 per month. That is over €3,000 a year. People are hanging on by their fingertips, we are in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis, rents have skyrocketed and the Minister is going to add on €3,000 a year. Who can afford that? We TDs can afford it, but the ordinary man and woman in the street trying to keep a roof over their head cannot.

If the Government were serious about tackling the crisis in the rental sector, it would take real action.

In Cork city, there are 2,197 people and families getting housing assistance payment, HAP, or rental accommodation scheme, RAS. Those families are entitled to social housing but, because the Government did not build and is not building enough social housing, they are in private rented accommodation. That is 10% of the rented accommodation in Cork. These people, if the Government would build social housing, could move into it, releasing those 2,200 properties to other people to rent. That would help drive rents but instead, the Government is driving them up. It is about delivering supply.

Instead of focusing on tax breaks and increasing rents for speculators, developers, investors and vulture funds, the Government needs to work for ordinary renters. A ban on evictions, a three-year ban on rent increases and increasing the supply of social and affordable housing are solutions that will help renters. They will support families, help workers and help prevent more families and, in particular, children, going into emergency accommodation and becoming homeless.

There is a famous line from the movie, "Wall Street": "Greed is good." Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, the Healy-Rae and the Lowry Independents stand for that. Greed is good for the speculators, the investors and the vulture funds, and we 100% oppose that.

Conor McGuinness (Waterford, Sinn Fein)
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The Minister's rip-off rent Bill changes how renting is regulated. It is a shift that will make an already broken system even worse, if people could credit that. It will shaft renters. At a time those renters are facing record rents and intense cost-of-living pressures, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, the Healy-Rae group and the Lowry group have chosen to gut controls when they should be strengthening them.

The central change in the Minister's legislation is the introduction of these market rent resets. Under his model, rents can be reset to prevailing market levels at the start of new tenancies and again after fixed periods. That is a clear move away from rent restraint and towards a system that ensures sharp increases become routine for renters.

Rents are already far beyond what many households can afford. Supply is constrained because of decisions of the Minister and his predecessors in Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael over many years. Instead of acting to stabilise the market and building homes, the Government is embedding a mechanism that will ensure that rents rise again and again.

The Bill will not reduce rents. It will not deliver stability. It will not prevent homelessness. It locks in higher rents into the future and leaves renters carrying all of the risk and all of the pain. It means a rental system designed to push rents higher, not lower. It means workers and families facing sudden rent hikes that they cannot plan for or absorb. It means insecurity built into the system as a feature, not treated as a failure. It means the Government choosing to side, as always, with large investors seeking higher returns, rather than renters trying to keep a roof over their heads.

The impact of this approach will be widespread. The private rental sector has high turnover and relatively short tenancies. As a result, these resets will not be confined to a small group, as the Minister tells the media and anybody who will listen, but will over time become the default experience for most renters. If this shadowy legislation is forced through - it looks like it will be, despite there being none of the Government backbenchers present to hear the debate - from next year, new tenancies will increasingly be exposed to immediate resets. Students entering the private rental sector will be caught by the same approach. Over time, even tenants who have already endured no-fault evictions will face market resets after fixed periods.

The direction of travel is very clear. It behoves the Minister to be open and honest about that, something that he and his colleagues in government, including the Minister of State, Deputy Cummins, have failed to be thus far. Concerns about this legislation are not confined to Sinn Féin and the Opposition parties. Organisations working on the front line of homelessness, including the Simon Communities of Ireland, have warned that unaffordable rents are a direct driver of homelessness, and that the Minister's upward rent resets risk undermining security of tenure in practice. The Bill rips off renters, with higher rents, weaker security and more people pushed to the edge. Sinn Féin will oppose it because renters cannot absorb any more pressure. The people I represent, the people we represent, cannot take any more. Government policy should be focused on reducing rents, not driving them up even further in the interests of those who tell the Minister what to do, and who designed this approach and this legislation.

Conor Sheehan (Limerick City, Labour)
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This legislation seeks to rewrite the rental rules for the seventh time in a decade. In his speech, the Minister spoke about moderating price growth. Bar the tacit acknowledgement in his speech that rents are too high, there is nothing in the Bill that will bring rents down. I looked on daft.ie recently and I found that within a kilometre of Leinster House, it is €695 a week for a studio apartment on Hatch Street, €4,500 a month on Tara Street, and for a two-bedroom apartment on Grand Canal Place, it is €3,600 a month. In what world is that affordable? Under the Bill, people who are already being forced to pay that level of rent will find their rent going up by 15% or 20%.

I have no doubt that we will be back here, if not next year or the year after, then in three years’ time, debating this again. This Bill is going to put a rocket booster under rents in the private rental sector. Either the Minister or some other Minister for housing is going to come under undue political pressure and will have to come back to try to address this again. The rental market in this country is critically dysfunctional, and it is always renters who are forced to deal with the consequences of this dysfunction. The Government talks about certainty and stability but the only certainty with this is that rents are going to continue to rise, and they are going to rise faster than they have risen in the last decade.

The Bill is confusing, incoherent and fundamentally unenforceable. The Minister claims that the legislation is about balance but we know that the Bill is going to put fuel on the fire of spiralling rents and evictions. It is renters who will continue to suffer. I do not understand how the Government thinks, in a cost-of-living crisis, that rents should be allowed to rise further. In my view, the Bill essentially amounts to the Government folding the tent and giving in to large landlords and Irish institutional property. They are the ones who wanted the rent pressure zones gone, and the ones who are ultimately going to celebrate the passage of this Bill. The Minister has figured out a way to almost remove RPZs by stealth because they will effectively be useless with the market reset mechanism.

The biggest landlords will claim that rent pressure zones have all but killed institutional investment. They will point to the fall-off in apartment completions and claim it is down to RPZs. We know that is not completely accurate, and that rising interest rates and input costs have significantly impacted apartment construction. The empirical evidence of the impact of the RPZs on the supply of housing is limited. In fact, in their original 4% version, the RPZs did not have a negative impact on supply. I do not understand why the Government did not even consider reverting to the pre-2021, 4% rate instead of this convoluted, confusing mess. The only reason I can think of, to be honest, is to go back to what the Taoiseach said a year ago this week, when he went on the "This Week" programme and floated ripping up rent pressure zones. He said he was open to a "pivot". It is very clear from the Bill that when the Taoiseach went on the radio that time, he said the quiet bit out loud, and the pivot he referred to was ipso facto the removal of rent controls.

As others have said, we know the sheer amount of churn in the private rental sector is going to mean that this legislation will effectively be the same as having no rent controls. The six-year rule will mean that while a tenant is protected at the beginning, they will be exposed to market rents at the end of the six-year period, if they even get that far, because we know the average tenancy is from three years to three and a half years. This Bill will lock renters into an inflationary spiral that is even worse than what we have already seen. The average length of a tenancy in a build-to-rent development is one year, which means the rent for renters in these developments is going to be reset to the market rate. It is going to go up and up every single year.

The Bill makes a mockery of extending RPZs nationally. It effectively guts rent controls. This is the seventh time we have done this in a decade. The chopping and changing is leaving renters in what I can only describe as a shark tank. If we are honest, we are all seeing it in our constituency offices in recent weeks and months: the rising evictions, the notices to quit, and the landlords hoping to get ahead of the six-year tenancies and the restrictions that are coming down the track. The Government has nothing to offer these people except higher rents.

RPZ legislation is meant to protect students. It is not meant to create a backdoor for further price hikes targeted at students. Students will be some of the people hardest hit by this. We know that students in this country, by and large, live in private rental accommodation and move accommodation every single year, as they are required to. Their rent is going to rise every single year. They are being repeatedly screwed.

I look at my own city of Limerick, where the average rent is now €1,800. Rents in Dublin have gone up by 94% in the past decade. This Bill is going to put a rocket under that. If we look at the RTB data from quarter 4 of 2025, the average annual rent increase in a non-RPZ area was 11.6%. By allowing landlords to reset the rent in between tenancies, the Government is condemning renters in this country to at least an 11.6% rent increase. Given that the average rent for a new tenancy in this country is €731, the 11.6% increase means the average renter will have to pay at least €200 more per month.

I have appealed to the Government on the floor of this House and to the Minister in writing to remove the market rent reset mechanism from this legislation. There are laudable elements to this proposed legislation but the rip-off rent mechanism renders every increased protection absolutely bloody useless.

The evidence from the RTB's assessment of property price rental growth in Ireland shows that in 75% of cases when the tenancy turns over landlords increase the rent. This is why I have appealed to the Government and I have appealed to the Minister that if they are not going to remove the market reset mechanism, at the very least they should include a rent break. We need to give renters some modicum of protection against extreme rent increases. The one thing I know for sure is that when these rent increases come on board they are going to become politically unsustainable for this Government. I ask the Minister to bring forward amendments to put a rent break into this Bill, or at the very least to support an amendment I will bring forward. There is so much in this legislation that does not make sense. For example, the distinction between small and large landlords is something that nobody asked for. We will have a situation where we are going to have multiple different sets of rules for different tenants. There will be new tenants of larger landlords, new tenants of smaller landlords, and existing tenants of both. The level of complexity is going to make this virtually impossible for tenants to actually understand, never mind their landlords, and also for the RTB which will have to enforce this. This is a recipe for confusion and chaos. It means that renters, as they always do and as they always have done under this Government, will pay the price. The changes around security of tenure and the restrictions on eviction for sale should be applied universally to all landlords irrespective of the number of properties they own. That is the norm in other jurisdictions.

The creation of the rent register is something in this legislation that I and the Labour Party have called for for some time. We proposed this as far back as 2016 and it is fundamentally necessary. Many of the issues with rent setting in this country are caused by a lack of data. We need to start this data collection process because we need to move to a long-term and sustainable data-driven model for rent setting. It is vital for tenants to know the history of the rent charged on their home so they can be confident that they are being charged the lawfully permitted rent. There might be some issues in relation to the Data Protection Commission but my concern is that the Minister and the Government should have used the Pobal HP deprivation index to more accurately pinpoint areas of material deprivation which in some cases, such as my own city of Limerick, are right next to affluent areas.

The fundamental issue with this Bill remains. Despite all its intricacies, it leaves renters exposed to potentially huge rent increases with little in the way of emergency protections, given the average duration of a tenancy and the churn that is there in the rental market in this country. I am really concerned that we are going to see a return to economic evictions where people are literally going to have to leave their homes because they cannot pay the rent. This is why I have called for the rent break mechanism as a simple safeguard. What the Minister, Deputy Browne, has come in with here today is confusing, fragmented and will be impossible to enforce in the real world.

In response to concerns I raised through Oral Questions a couple of weeks ago, the Minister said that all proposals would be examined and given a fair assessment. If that commitment means anything, I ask the Government to accept an amendment for a rent break. Renters cannot afford any more half measures, any more complexity or any more ideology designed to benefit institutional investors and property developers dressed up as protections and reform. This Bill as it is currently presented here is going to fail. It is not going to stop rents rising. It is not going to necessarily guarantee any supply. If it guarantees any supply, it will be expensive build-to-rent apartments in high-end developments like the Dublin docklands, and maybe some in Cork. It is not going to bring down rents. There is no vision here. There is no long-term vision for renting in this country beyond giving landlords and institutional investors whatever they want. Yes, Government policy must be focused on increasing supply but if the Government is serious about increasing supply, it could ensure it meets its targets for the first time. It has never met its targets for social and affordable housing. It has abandoned the annual targets for the private sector under this housing plan because it knows it does not have a hope of reaching them. We are not going to get the supply, and certainly not the supply of social and affordable housing we need, by offering up renters on a silver platter for developers and institutional landlords to devour.

There has been little or no modelling done on this legislation. It does not make any sense. When the RPZ regime was introduced by the Department in 2016, extensive modelling work was done at the time. We need to see a commitment for a review within two years. I guarantee everyone in this House tonight that this is not the end when it comes to rent setting and renting here in Ireland. Rents are going to go up by an unsustainable level and the Minister, or whoever his successor is, will be back here again trying to fix it because this is absolutely botched. Go raibh maith agat.

Marie Sherlock (Dublin Central, Labour)
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Since the announcement was made last June of the proposed changes to take effect, the Minister, Deputy Browne, and the Government have unleashed havoc upon thousands of renters out there who are now facing notices to quit. In the third quarter of last year, 5,400 tenants received a notice to quit. That is up from about 3,000 in the previous year. For the people who are coming through my clinics in Dublin Central, it is really distressing because they have nowhere to go. We have spoken at length about the extortionate high rents in Dublin. There is a lot of talk about the market rate but we know the market rate is set by a small number of institutional investors who set the price for everyone else in the rental market, particularly in the main urban centres. This is driving the eye-watering rents of €2,500 that we are seeing in many parts of this city.

This evening I want to raise specifically the two new classes of landlords, and by extension tenants, that will be created in this legislation. These are landlords with four or more units, and those with four or less units. What I am seeing at the moment is three examples of landlords strategically evicting tenants to avoid the so-called "Tyrrelstown amendment". They are evicting groups of tenants in fewer than ten units. This is to avail of the magic number of below ten. They are doing this over a staggered period of months. I do not know how widespread this practice is. I suppose the key issue is what the RTB is seeing in this. We would have been critical in the past about data collection within the RTB, and we believe there needs to be an awful lot more reporting, but the critical issue here is that we now have different thresholds being set out in the rental legislation. The Tyrrelstown amendment refers to landlords with ten or more holdings wishing to sell.

Of course, we now have this new provision for landlords with four. We need to level the playing field. We need hugely to tighten up on the Tyrrelstown amendment and we need to make sure we do not see what I am calling strategic evictions. One is a unit along the north quays, a building which was in NAMA and was in receivership for 13 years. The minute that debt was discharged the company has gone into liquidation and the sale is happening. The other is for renovation purposes. When I look at the notice of termination, I have to question whether all of the tenants have to be evicted for the renovations that are being proposed. I think there is a lot of gaming of the system happening at the moment.

The appeals have been made to the Minister not to introduce this rent reset and to row back on the profound changes being introduced, which are already wreaking havoc on the system. In particular, we need to look closely at the mass eviction of fewer than ten units. What trends are happening in the RTB at this point? We need to move speedily to ensure there is a level playing field between the four and the ten. I know my colleague, Deputy Sheehan, will be bringing forward amendments on this.

Cormac Devlin (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)
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I support the Residential Tenancies (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2026. This legislation is about two things that renters and would-be renters need more than anything else, which are security and certainty. It strengthens tenants' protection in a way we have not seen before while creating clearer and more stable conditions for investment so we can grow our rental supply. Put bluntly, a rental system is nothing without the supply. It is not a system. It is a queue. We all know the reality. Too many people are paying too much for too little, with too little confidence about what happens next. The current framework, especially the uneven RPZ map, has not delivered the stability tenants deserve and has not provided the confidence needed to expand the pool of rental homes.

The Housing Agency review made clear that the change is needed and that the Bill is that change. I will start with the tenant protections because they are substantial. From 1 March this year we will move to a national system of rent regulation. That means renter increases will be linked to the Irish consumer price index with a cap of 2% per annum pro rata for existing tenancies applied nationally and not just in certain zones. In plain English, every renter gets the protection, not just the lucky ones who happen to live on the right side of those RPZ boundaries. Second, this Bill introduces rolling tenancies of minimum duration of six years for new tenancies. This is a major step forward in security of tenure. It also significantly restricts so-called no-fault evictions, particularly for larger landlords. Tenants will have greater ability to put down roots, keep children in the same school and plan their lives without the constant fear a notice will land on their doormat within 12 months.

At the same time, the Bill recognises the reality of the sector. It differentiates between smaller and larger landlords in a sensible way. Smaller landlords will have limited flexibility in defined circumstances, such as genuine hardship requiring sale or where a close family member needs to live in the property. Crucially, larger landlords will not be able to terminate for sale, refurbishment, own use or change of use. In other words, we are closing the door on arbitrary terminations while keeping the reasonable grounds where a tenant is not meeting obligations or where the home is no longer suitable for a household's needs.

Let us now address the question that also comes up and that is supply. We all know that the long-term solution to high rents is more housing. Rent controls help but they cannot conjure more homes into existence. This Bill does something important. It pairs stronger protections with a framework that can retain and attract supply, including by allowing rents to be reset to market rent between different tenancies but only in tightly controlled circumstances and never following a no-fault termination. This is a critical safeguard against economic evictions.

The Bill also sends a clear signal on apartment delivery. For new apartments, rent increases will be linked to the CPI without the 2% cap. The policy intent is straightforward. It is to provide predictable inflation linkage to support viability and investment in the kind of housing we need most in our cities and large towns. It is also a pro-supply measure, and it is essential.

I want to illustrate this Bill in the wider reality of delivery. Nationally, 36,284 new homes were completed last year, up from 30,330 in 2024. That is a 20% increase. Apartment completions reached 12,047 units, up almost 39% and single dwelling completions rose to 5,929, up 12.5%. That is momentum and we need to build on it, not talk it down. The Government needs to pull every lever at its disposal because the answer to housing is supply, supply and more supply.

We can see what it looks like on the ground in Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown. The council's own reporting shows the scale of ambition and delivery under way, including the Housing Delivery Action Plan targets of 1,994 social homes and 1,057 affordable homes, with the council now expecting to exceed the social housing target, rising to 2,142 social homes over the period. They are progressing affordable delivery in Woodbrook and unlocking major land and infrastructure opportunities in Lehaunstown with potential for hundreds of homes and local area plan areas with potential for over 1,000 more units.

This is where I must make the political point because it needs to be said plainly. Once again, Deputies on the other side of the House oppose to efforts to build more homes and resolve the housing crisis but that is not surprising. They opposed the establishment of the LDA, which has developed 597 units in my constituency, and they are occupied. They were also opposed to supports for first-time buyers that have seen thousands of people buy their first homes. They were opposed to the rent pressure zones when they initially came in which gave renters the break. They were opposed to every effort to encourage private investment in housing, thus increasing supply. You cannot oppose every measure and then complain the system is not working.

I also want to acknowledge the implementation because legislation is only as good as enforcement. The Bill is backed by increased resources for the RTB and the establishment of a rent price register to provide transparency, reduce disputes and strengthen compliance.

I welcome the leadership of the Minister, Deputy Browne, on this. He is acting decisively to protect tenants while also creating the policy conditions to grow supply. The Bill is balanced, serious and necessary and it deserves the support of everyone in the House.

Rose Conway-Walsh (Mayo, Sinn Fein)
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This Bill must be called out for what it is. It is a Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael rip-off rent hike Bill and it must be stopped. I will tell the Minister the reasons why. The Government should be cutting rents, not facilitating them to rise even further. Rents are already out of control and renters are drowning in a cost-of-living crisis. Yet, the Government's response is to tear up what little protection remains and hand a gift to big institutional investors.

At the centre of this Bill is the so-called market reset allowing landlords to hike rents to full market levels between tenancies, not 2% and not inflation, but whatever the market can squeeze out of people. Students will be the worst hit. I have talked to so many students about this. From September, students entering the private rental sector will face immediate market resets on what they are paying already. For families in Mayo, this is absolutely devastating and nothing short of daylight robbery and extortion. Commuting is simply not an option for most students and for students in rural Ireland. Parents have no choice but to pay whatever rent is demanded, no matter how extortionate. How are parents expected to absorb this on top of the food, fuel, fees and childcare for younger children? How many students will be priced out of education altogether?

I move on to the figures for tenancies in County Mayo, which speak for themselves. New tenancies average €1,181, compared with €949 for existing ones. That is €232 extra every single month, or nearly €2,800 over a year - a 24% increase. That the Government is happy to stand over that is unbelievable. The Bill bids farewell to the modest protections of the rent pressure zones with tenancies lasting an average of just three and a half years. Within a short few years, most renters will be caught out by this reset. Renters and families need a break. Sinn Féin is calling for the rents to be cut, and for an emergency three-year ban on rent increases. The Bill does exactly the opposite and that is why we will oppose it.

Donna McGettigan (Clare, Sinn Fein)
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Under this Residential Tenancies (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill, students will be among the hardest hit. At a time when students are already being pushed to the pin of their collar and students’ unions are having to set up food banks, the Government is choosing to turn its back on them once again with this Fianna Fáil-Fine Gael, rip-off rent hike Bill. Under these proposals, student-specific accommodation rents can be reset every three years, opening the door to higher rents and greater insecurity for students and their families.

This student accommodation crisis did not appear overnight. Rather, it is the direct result of the Government’s failure to meet student accommodation targets and deliver publicly owned, genuinely affordable student accommodation. As a result, the majority of students are now forced into the private rental market and unsecure digs where they have little protection and even less certainty.

The figures in reports speak for themselves. The number of student beds delivered is down 54% from 2024, with just 422 beds expected to be delivered this year. That is the lowest in over 20 years. That is a policy failure.

The proposed changes will mean that students in private accommodation may now face year-on-year rent hikes with no real safeguards. At a time of spiralling costs, the Government is adding pressure instead of relief. The National Youth Council of Ireland has found that accommodation is now the single biggest cost-of-living issue for students and young people and, alarmingly, two thirds of those aged between 18 and 24 believe they would be better off living in another country. That is shameful and it is down to this Government. What protections will students in private accommodation be given? Where is the certainty of fairness? The Government needs to cut rents and introduce an emergency three-year ban on rent increases. Students and families need affordable rents, real protections and public investment rather than broken promises.

Rory Hearne (Dublin North-West, Social Democrats)
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I am not quite sure whether the Minister genuinely believes what he is setting out and has been saying in public. Let us explain honestly what the Minister is doing. With regard to the claim that renters will get certainty from this Bill, the truth, no matter what way he tries to spin it, is that the only certainty it gives existing renters, the 250,000 households renting right now, is that their current tenancies will continue into the future with the same threat of eviction as exists today. They get no new security of tenure. Yes, rents will remain capped at 2% per year but they will get no new existing security of tenure. There is this spinning that this is a Bill that will give renters greater security, but all existing tenants will get no greater security. The Minister is being dishonest and misleading in claiming and stating publicly that this Bill gives renters greater security of tenure. To existing renters, all of those who are in their homes, they get no extra security of tenure. The certainty they get is the continued threat of eviction. They get no new protection.

What will new renters - those who take up new tenancies - get? They get the certainty of permanently higher rents. First, when they take up a new place, the previous 2% inter-tenancy rent cap from the previous tenant is being removed and landlords will be able to increase the rent where there has not been a no-fault eviction, which is in the overwhelming majority of cases. They will be able to put the rent at market rent, meaning all new renters taking up new tenancies will face higher rents. They will face market rents. Will the Minister at least have the decency and honesty to admit that? What renters are going to face is market rents. On top of that, when they take up the new tenancy, within six years they will face an increase in rent to market rents. Currently, for existing tenants, it is 2% per year. There is no point at which their rent can be reset to market rent. Under the new proposals in this legislation, however, for new tenancies that renters take up, landlords will be able to reset their rent to market rent every six years. We know what market rent is; it is absolutely unaffordable, extortionate rent. What will it be in six years’ time?

I say to the people of Ireland and the public today that if the Social Democrats are in government in four or five years’ time after the next election, we will make sure to change it so that they will not face that market reset of rents. What is set out here is a recipe for the disaster and catastrophe in housing to become even worse. It is a recipe for rising homelessness. That is what this Bill is. It will cause increased homelessness in two ways. First, it does nothing to prevent the ongoing tsunami of homelessness and the thousands of evictions of existing renters. It does nothing to increase security of tenure for them. Second, when renters are evicted and they try to find somewhere else, there will be nowhere to go because everything will have been brought up to market rents.

The Minister set it out very clearly. He says that, on the one hand, the Government recognises that rents are very high. It is great that it does, but it will allow them to go even higher. What is it going to do? When a new tenancy lasts for over six years, the landlord will be allowed to reset the rent to market rent at the end of each six-year period. The Minister said that he does not want rents for long-term tenancies to fall behind market rents. He wants all renters to be paying the market rent. Currently, there are hundreds of thousands of renters who are paying below the market rent. In some cases, it is an affordable rent and, in other cases, it is a higher rent, but it is not the market rent. This Bill – the Minister said it very straight and plainly – is a Bill to bring all rents up to market rent, which is absolutely unaffordable.

It is wrong and it will be deeply damaging for many people in this country. The Minister wants renters to be paying market rents. Of course, the assumption and market theory justifying the Bill, one which the Housing Agency set out as well and with which I disagree, is that we allow rents to increase and then we will see an increase in institutional investment and more funds will come in. That will then lead to a supply that will, at some point in the future, lead to lower rents. Dr. Lorcan Sirr set out before the housing committee clearly that this assumption and theory has no foundation. As he set out, the theory is that the increased supply we are looking for is going to bring down rents, but no one can ever say when. The Minister will not say when rents will come down as a result of these rent increases. Dr. Sirr said:

In my history, and from looking at my trends, charts and data, it has never happened yet because the quantity that we would need to bring down rents is so great that it is never going to happen.

What institutional investor is going to build apartments that are going to bring down rents? It is a flawed assumption. It is a flawed theory. It is based on free market economic theory that does not work in the context of housing. We know it does not. What developer or investor is going to build the unit that will lead to lower prices and rents? It is not true.

We know very clearly why this Bill has been introduced. This is a Bill that was pushed for by institutional investors, particularly by Irish Institutional Property. Mr. Pat Farrell, former Fianna Fáil chairperson and Senator, leads Irish Institutional Property and he has had multiple meetings with the Minister and his predecessor. Meeting after meeting with Department officials and the Minister are set out in the lobbying register.

6 o’clock

The relevant matter is that Pat Farrell of Irish Institutional Property, formerly a designated public official, DPO, and Member of the Seanad, met David Kelly, an assistant secretary in the Department of housing. What was the intended result? The intended result, which was set out on the lobbying register, was to "inform public policy review on rent regulation having regard to published [institutional investment policy] priorities". What does that mean? It means what he said in May last year, as was reported in the Business Post. Pat Farrell of Irish Institutional Property said that rent caps had stalled equity into Ireland, as the rate of return on investment was not lucrative enough for the build-to-rent sector. He said the rental cap policy has been "disastrous" and needs to be lifted.

The Minister can dress it up any way he wants. The reality is that he is lifting these rent caps for the institutional investors so that they will increase supply, which will, at some mythical point in the future, lead to lower rents. It is not going to lead to lower rents, and the Minister knows that. He should at least have the honesty to admit that. They are, as the Minister set out in his statement, going to lead to all rents being brought up to market rent level. For what? Is it so that we can have more box units at €3,000 or €3,500 per month? What are those rents going to be in two or three years' time? Will they be €4,000 per month? Who can afford these rents? It is not economically sustainable.

Fianna Fáil is bringing us back to another property crash and another financial crash through unsustainable rents, just as there were unsustainable house prices in the past. Who is it for? Who is going to pay for it? That is a question the Taoiseach and the Minister do not address. Who are going to pay the rents? Young people at the moment are stuck in box rooms. Are they going to move out and pay €3,500 or €4,000 per month? They are not going to do it. They will still be stuck in the box room. People will be in overcrowded situations. People will be spending all their income on rent. What nurse, garda or teacher will be able to afford these rents? They cannot afford the rents as they are. How are they going to afford higher rents?

What has happened is that Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have been captured by institutional investors into thinking that this is the solution. I believe they are making a political calculation that is about units and not homes. The Government is lauding this increase in the number of units built last year. The Minister set this out himself. Where was the majority of unit increases? It was in apartments. Who is buying apartments? What household or young person is buying apartments? None of them are doing so. None of those units are for sale. They are all build-to-rent and with rents that no one can afford.

What does the Government want? Is it more apartment blocks for which no one can afford the rent? That is not sustainable. They are not homes for people.

The Social Democrats have set out alternative policies, even though the Minister denies it. The Taoiseach says that there are no solutions, that nobody else is putting forward solutions and that we need to rely on the private market and institutional investors. We do not. That is one of the most frustrating things. The Government does not believe in the Irish people's capacity to solve our own crisis. Councils in the past, when this country had nothing, built public housing for people across this country. What the Government is now doing is sacrificing future generations and to making them pay rents that they will be locked into. It is going to create a permanent class of renters. It is like returning us to serfdom. It is happening not just in Ireland but in other countries. Institutional and global wealth funds want to turn younger generations into a permanent class of renters who pay an income into their pension funds and wealth funds. What the Government is doing is facilitating that.

It is ironic that Fianna Fáil, supposedly the party of home ownership, is standing over the reduction in home ownership and the reduced possibility of home ownership. How are young people supposed to be able to save for a deposit when they have to pay €3,000 or €3,500 per month in rent? The Government is taking the future possibility of home ownership away from them in order to get some units on a spreadsheet so that it can say it has reached its targets or is heading close to them. It is not thinking about what is being built. Affordable housing is not being built. The Government has been captured. With this legislation, the Minister is taking a deeply disappointing measure. I do not believe it will work. We have seen that we cannot rely on global finance to deliver affordable housing, or housing full stop. At what point do those global financiers say they have enough profit or sufficient returns? It is never enough. The funds are based on every year increasing the rate of return. That is the way these funds work. Surely the Minister knows that. There is no point at which they will turn around and reduce the rents. The Minister is locking our housing system into an unaffordable supply of housing. That is fundamentally flawed.

There is an alternative. We have €166 billion lying in bank accounts in this country. We could be using that to build affordable homes. We have set out a proposal today - I look forward to the Minister's response to it - for a State construction company that would build affordable and social housing at scale. We could do that.

I seriously ask the Minister to reconsider at this last moment. I ask him to pull back and not introduce the aspects of this Bill that will lead to the reset to market rents. The Government is going to unleash housing misery on hundreds of thousands of people and on future renters in this country. I do not get it. The Minister knows. How are people going to be able to afford even higher rents than they are paying now? Rents will be reset year after year and tenancy after tenancy. Properties will be churned back to higher market rents. This is a completely flawed Bill in its rent increases. There are alternatives. The Social Democrats will be opposing the legislation.

Sinéad Gibney (Dublin Rathdown, Social Democrats)
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I echo my party colleague's baffled and confounded response to this legislation. It fails to acknowledge the absolutely dire situation that so many renters are in, the crisis and emergency that this Government has created and the failure of the Government to provide any solutions. The system is pricing people out of renting and this Bill is only going to make matters worse.

In my constituency, grown-up people are stuck in their family home, unable to grow any further in their own lives. This Bill represents a false solution to the problems faced by renters. It is a reality we have heard at committee and from all the experts that if this Bill passes, the sky-high rents in this country will continue to rise. Setting rent anew with new leases means properties that have had their already very high rents capped at a 2% increase per year will see rents sky-rocket. Already in my constituency, if you search for Dundrum on daft.ie, the lowest cost two-bedroom property is priced at €2,500 per month. The lowest priced one-bedroom property is €1,700. I cannot imagine how a young family or working professional, or anyone but the wealthiest in society, can survive and plan for their future while paying €30,000 a year in rent.

People have contacted my office desperate for help, unable to dream of getting to the top of the housing list. Spiralling rents are leaving them trapped in homelessness. Níl aon tinteán mar do thinteán féin, ach tá na daoine seo fágtha gan tinteán ar bith.

Grown-up children are stuck in their family homes and unable to grow. People are putting off having children because they do not have room in the family home. They cannot imagine raising a family when they could be pushed out by rent increases or evictions at any time. The sense of hopelessness felt by those stuck in this situation is palpable. People tell me about all the things they cannot do and all the ways that their lives are impacted. It is leaving people in unsafe living conditions with damp and mould. There are cases where people cannot escape a bad family situation because they have nowhere to go and no resources to pay nearly €2,000 per month for the most basic option available in the private market. It is leaving people in jobs they want to escape and limiting their educational opportunities, all because those who have somewhere are so desperate to keep a roof over their heads and trying to find somewhere to rent at an affordable rent is nigh on impossible.

This Bill represents a false solution. That is crystal clear in the simple fact that part of the goal of this Bill is to allow rents to continue to rise. We are faced with market-driven solution after market-driven solution. I know we are given the message back that we do not see any place for market-driven solutions, but that is not the case.

We do see a place for market-driven solutions but the Government seems to be blinded by them alone. It is time for us to finally view housing in this country as a public good and a human right, not as an asset to be leveraged in every which way to the detriment of real people. There are no safeguards against constructive evictions so that landlords can reset to a market rent. We know we need a radical reset in housing. I do not see how a plan based around allowing rents to be hiked with every new lease delivers on that much-needed reset.

Catherine Callaghan (Carlow-Kilkenny, Fine Gael)
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Speaking as the mother of two teenagers and one young adult who is renting, I am acutely aware of the pressures within Ireland's rental market currently. To make their way in the world, develop independent living skills and build the relationships that will last throughout their lifetimes, young people need a space they can call their own. Unfortunately, these spaces are becoming increasingly rare. In the most recent daft.ie report on the state of the Irish rental sector, a 20% reduction in the number of rental properties available was recorded. It does not take a degree in economics to know that where supply is diminished, prices will naturally rise. It is these price hikes that are barring young people and increasingly people in their 20s and 30s from entering the market. As things stand in Ireland's rental market, an entire generation is faced with an unenviable choice - return to your childhood bedroom or pack your bags and emigrate, as many generations before have done. In Carlow and Kilkenny, the picture is no different. A quick scan online yesterday showed that in the whole of County Carlow, only 23 properties were available to rent. In Kilkenny, there were 13 in the entire county yesterday.

If we are to provide for renters and protect their dignity, we must get to grips with providing rental accommodation. The Government has identified the problem as one of supply. While the Opposition would prefer inaction, this Government is prepared to do something about that. The key to this approach as envisaged in this proposed Bill is to dismantle the existing vicious cycle of dwindling rental supply. Landlords with existing long-term tenants under previous conditions found they could not reset rents to reflect market rates legally. Even with new tenants, a landlord's ability to set a new rent was linked to the rate of the previous tenancy, effectively ensuring that small rural landlords were permanently kept below water. Facing rising costs in maintenance, insurance and mortgage interest, these landlords found they were simply not allowed to keep pace with the world around them. Making the only rational choice, small rural landlords decided to leave the market, decreasing rental supply even further and raising the market rates yet higher. An ESRI report on the supply-side effects of excessive regulation found that rent controls, specifically after they were tightened, brought about market exits, with the RPZ status associated with significantly fewer rent listings and registrations.

If we are to boost supply, we must encourage those who provide it to enter the market. This is not about siding with landlords or renters or vice versa. It is about designing a system that works for everyone by working with everyone. Allowing landlords to reset to market rents for new tenancies will encourage these small landlords, who provide the backbone of rural Ireland's rental market, to open up their properties to rent. A six-year tenancy of minimum duration will provide the security that renters need to live their lives in comfort. Neither party should be at a disadvantage. There should be no reason we cannot simultaneously protect renters' rights while bringing landlords into the market. Presenting Ireland's rental market as a conflict between landlords and renters is a false binary peddled by those who prefer struggles to solutions.

In the medium term, the policies outlined in this proposed Bill will bring supply on board, stabilise the market and put roofs over our young people's futures. I acknowledge change will not be instant, nor will it be without worry for some landlords and tenants, as change always brings about fear of the unknown. These measures will undoubtedly take time to become effective and may lead to a temporary rise in rents. I am buoyed, however, by the progress being made across government in the housing market. As we now know, housing delivery is ramping up at an unprecedented scale and solutions put in place by this Government are bearing fruit. This proposed Bill is one such solution. I am confident that in time it too will benefit us all.

Joanna Byrne (Louth, Sinn Fein)
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Each time I have the opportunity to speak on housing, I say this. I have to start by reiterating that for the common good, I want every Government housing and homelessness policy to be effective. For every person on the housing list, the hidden homeless, every family in a homeless hub and all of those in emergency accommodation, I want the Government's policies to work. The fact is, however, they are not working. Rent controls have not worked. Now we have this Bill, the latest Government intervention in the rental market that will make things worse for renters and allow rents to rise, and ultimately, there will be people who are no longer able to afford their rental accommodation and will also end up in their local authority housing office trying to source emergency accommodation. This is at a time when we are at a record level of homelessness, with almost 17,000 people homeless, including 5,000 children. People had a little bit of protection in rent pressure zones but with the Bill, the Government is taking that protection away. Nobody wants this Bill, except for the big institutional investors to increase their profits. The Government's entire housing and rental policy seems to be in service to those big businesses, not the men, women and children who need affordable rental accommodation throughout this State.

Towards the end of last year, in Louth, market rents were on average 6.4% higher in 2025 than in the previous year. The average listed rent is now €1,907 a month, up 52% from the time of the Covid pandemic, but that is averaged across the county. It is much higher in my home town of Drogheda and in the south of the county, as people there bought in the ever-expanding commuter belt. Only last week, a modest three-bedroom terraced home was advertised for an eye-watering €3,250 per month. This Bill will continue to drive those rents up for an average apartment or house in the wee county. We can be damn sure the rise in rent will be not so wee. This is nothing more than a rip-off rental Bill the Government needs to bin now.

Shónagh Ní Raghallaigh (Kildare South, Sinn Fein)
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Is é bun agus barr an scéil leis an mBille seo ná go gcuirfidh sé drochbhail ar chíosaithe trí chostas tithíochta a ardú, costas atá cheana féin i bhfad ró-ard.

The bottom line with this Bill is that rents can be reset to market rate between tenancies, which means we will see already sky-high rents go up and up from March. We are already seeing the effects. Eviction notices have already gone up in anticipation of the new rules. In my constituency, I have been working with an 81-year-old man in Athy who has been renting in the same building for over 20 years at a rate that is now well below market rent. Now, all of a sudden, the landlord is moving in a family member. Under the new legislation, rents can be hiked up to market price every six years or if a tenant leaves voluntarily. Rents are going to be out of control within a matter of months.

This basically amounts to deregulating the rental sector and offers perverse incentives for landlords to create shorter tenancies. It is estimated that under the new regime, yearly rent will cost over €3,500 more in Kildare by the end of the decade. While the Government talks about creating sustainable and secure conditions for renters with this Bill, it will do exactly the opposite. One would have to wonder who the Government had in mind coming up with these new rules. It was not nurses, teachers, people in their 20s and 30s who have never moved out of the family home, families who would like to support their children moving away for college, the elderly receiving the State pension or low-income families receiving HAP, who will no longer be able to afford their top-up payments. These changes come at the behest of big institutional investors and vulture funds to increase their profits. What renters need now is hope, not hikes. Sinn Féin stands with renters and for affordability.

Brian Stanley (Laois, Independent)
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The Minister may not have noticed, and maybe Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil have not noticed, that tenants in private rental accommodation are already under huge stress. In case things were not bad enough, the Government is now going to throw them to the mercy of rack-renting landlords from 1 March. Whatever limits and calming effect rent pressure zones had in slowing down rent increases will all be gone. New rents will be pitched to the highest in the area. The sky will be the limit. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael surely know this. They know what is going on out there the same as I do. They know what is going to happen. Tenants going into new apartments or houses, or existing ones that become vacant, face extortionate increases. Tenancies do not just change every six years. The Government knows there is regular turnover. The average tenancy lasts about three and a half years.

Laois renters will be particularly hard hit, given the evidence of what is already going on in that sector in the county. Many tenants are under huge pressure and regularly tell me about this. They have to go short of meals, clothes and a whole range of things to try to keep the roof over their heads. They have to turn off heating. The RTB figures for last year show that rents in Laois for new tenancies had jumped 16.7%, higher than existing tenancies. The latest figures for new rents in Laois show that there has been another increase of 15.3% on existing tenancies. That is the current situation, before 1 March.

A crummy one-bedroom apartment now costs €,1750 per month. A three-bedroom house in Kilminchy costs €2,100 per month. A four-bedroom house in Foxburrow costs €2,500 per month. We have had the highest eight quarterly increases we have ever seen in the county, despite the fact that we have RPZs. The race is on for landlords to get to the top of the market and market rent. On top of all that, there can be annual increases of up to 2%. Who in the name of God can afford that? This will cause a catastrophe for people.

Existing tenants in homes and apartments will be put under huge pressure with higher rents. The Government is introducing measures it has said will provide tenants with security, but the Minister of State and I know how it works. We know how landlords will apply pressure. There will be strategic evictions and notices to quit because people will not be able to pay the rent.

I appeal to Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael not to push through the Bill. It will hurt tens of thousands of households that are already trying to keep their heads above the waterline in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis. It is a real difficulty for younger people who are over the income threshold for social housing and do not have a hope of being able to save a deposit. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael spoke about home ownership. People can forget about it because they will not be able to save for a deposit. They are trapped in private rented accommodation.

I am sure the Minister and Minister of State know an increasing number of people who are going past middle age, as well as elderly people who are paying massive rents; such people come to me. Where will they go when they hit pension age? The Government's contention is that the increase in the supply of housing will reduce rents. The evidence does not support that. The evidence at a committee did not show that. Between 2003 and 2007, the construction of new homes hit record levels, including over 90,000 in one year. Did rents go down? Not a hope. They did not. They increased dramatically. That is what happened.

The only beneficiaries of the Bill will be large rack renting landlords. I appeal to the Minister of State. Section 8 is absolutely shocking and will put huge pressure on people. I ask the Government not to try to force through the Bill, in particular section 8, and instead introduce effective rent controls for counties like Laois where rents are rocketing. I ask the Government to increase the support for Laois County Council and other councils around the country to build more cost-rental homes and improve housing affordability. I want more home ownership, rental housing and people in secure accommodation, but this Bill will not do that. It will pile pressure on people. I am not just coming in here to have a go. I am saying this because of what I see happening on the ground

Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)
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The pretence that the Government cares about the rental crisis and the unaffordable and obscene rents that are contributing to the housing crisis and misery that many people are suffering this country is being dropped completely. We have a naked admission with this Bill that the Government is representing property speculators, investors and landlords. It is trying to justify it with the most perverse logic ever, namely that it is going to raise rents that are already unaffordable in order to make rents drop. It is like the American military commander in Vietnam who said they had to bomb the villages to save them. It is the same perverse and Orwellian logic. I spotted it, as did Deputy Hearne, in the explanatory memorandum and in the Minister's speech where he admits this. The explanatory memorandum, regarding the purpose of the resetting upwards of already unaffordable rents to market rents, states: "The aim is to encourage investment in the rental sector by ensuring that rents in respect of long standing tenancies do not fall behind market rent". For the very few people out there who might have half affordable rent, the Government is to make sure they cannot even have that. We have to make sure, in the interests of the investors, that everybody is paying the highest possible rent because that is what the investors need.

The Minister admitted the same logic is behind the Government's thinking when he said earlier this year that housing is about international markets. It is actually a spreadsheet in Zurich, New York or Antwerp more so than a builder looking at a site in counties Longford or Roscommon and deciding what is happening here. That is it. The Government is dancing to the tune of speculators and investors in Antwerp, New York and Zurich, and of course we have our own home grown greedy landlords as well.

The Government will put up what are already the most unaffordable rents in Europe to even more unaffordable levels. Our rents are 30% higher than the EU average and the Government wants them to go higher. In Dublin, the average rent is now 50% of the after tax income of the average worker. That average is brought down by the fact that there is still a small number of slightly lower rents. When everything is reset to the highest level of market rent, that average will jump.

Rents have gone up by 41% in the past six years. If rent is reset every six years, 60,000 to 70,000 new tenancies will potentially go up by 40% every year. That is shocking, on top of the already obscene rental levels that are completely unaffordable for ordinary people. That makes a mockery of the so-called protections, including the security of tenure measures, because if rent is unaffordable and there is a churn of tenancies about every three and a half years, anybody looking for a new tenancy will be faced with completely unaffordable rents that could be up to 40% higher than the already unaffordable levels. They will have absolutely no chance of being able to afford those rents. All the while, the guys in Zurich, New York and Antwerp, and our own homegrown landlords, will be raking it in from these unaffordable rents.

It is also not entirely clear that the protections the Government claims are in place are working. Accommodation not being suitable to needs can still be grounds for eviction. People can be evicted for being in overcrowded accommodation. There will be new reasons for eviction, even under the so-called protections, such as cases where there are too many people living in a property. People may have had a kid or have a new partner who has kids and is in an overcrowded situation, and that now grounds for people to be evicted under the Bill. Of course that will happen. As landlords find other reasons for evictions, then will then have an incentive to drive up rents. The Government has given them an incentive. Even in the case of those who are marginally protected, the landlord now has an incentive to kick them out and get the rent up to the highest level. What the Government is doing is unbelievable. It is disgusting and shameful and will make the housing misery a lot worse for a lot of people.

Séamus Healy (Tipperary South, Independent)
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The only guarantee in the Bill is that the already unaffordable rip-off rents will be increased to extortionate proportions, and I mean all rents, not just those affecting tenancies, from 1 March. Over a very short period, all rents will increase to extortionate proportions. It is an outright attack on renters. Some 60,000 renters will have their rents increased every year by anything up to €3,000 to €3,500. It will lock renters out of the market and increase homelessness.

This Bill is written for, on behalf of and by big corporate landlords and institutional investors. There is a housing emergency in this State. A total of 16,734 persons were homeless on 31 December of this year, an increase of 1,870 on 2024. A total of 5,188 of those were children, up 678 on 2024. That is a scandal, and this Bill will make matters worse. The Government has consistently failed to meet its housing targets. This year it had a target of 41,000 units; it missed it by over 5,000 units. The fact of the matter is that the housing emergency we have in this country continues to undermine the very fabric of Irish society.

There is an alternative, and I continue to say we need the declaration in law of a housing emergency. That is the basis for any successful alternative to the current failed policies of this and previous Governments. Housing is a human right and is enshrined in Article 25 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Housing Commission deals with this housing emergency and says, "It is critical that this housing deficit is addressed through emergency action." Successive governments have failed to do that and failed to solve this housing crisis. The Government's current plan and this Bill fail. They are rebaked policies of previous Governments and previous plans. This one is no different. There is precedent for the declaration in law of a housing emergency. We had the Financial Emergency Measures in the Public Interest Acts between 2011 and 2016. A declaration of a housing emergency in law would ensure that the State and all its agencies, Departments of State, local authorities, approved housing bodies and utilities like Irish Water and the ESB would be required to take emergency action to solve the housing crisis. This approach is consistent with and faithful to both the spirit and the terms of Bunreacht na hÉireann, and I believe it should be implemented urgently because it is the only way this housing crisis can be dealt with and reasonable housing can be provided for Irish citizens. We need large-scale building of social and affordable houses on public land, we need to stop all evictions and we need to freeze rents, not to increase them to what are being called market rents, which are absolutely extortionate. We need a massive plan for local authorities to purchase vacant houses, to refurbish them and to let them to housing applicants. These are the first steps in a successful housing plan, and the very first step in that is the declaration of a housing emergency.

One final item I want to refer to is the current income limits for local authority housing applicants. They are completely out of date, totally inadequate and a huge pressure on ordinary families, working families and families on social welfare.

Ruth Coppinger (Dublin West, Solidarity)
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I have heard some contributions in here in my time but the contribution from the Fianna Fáil TD, the lament for landlords we just heard, was quite incredible. Her whole contribution was about the difficulties of the landlords in this era, in 2026. This is at a time when teachers, therapists and building workers cannot find anywhere to rent, when the average rent, as we know, is now €2,500 in Dublin. The Deputy's contribution showed very bizarre level of detachment. She certainly was not thinking about the likes of a tenant in my area who is reported in the newspapers today as having been charged extra for the use of a fridge, charged extra for the use of a dining table to study on and then asked to do work on the adjacent Airbnb the landlord was renting out, where 12 building workers were residing. This is going on in Clonsilla, in Dublin 15. Fair play to that tenant for fighting that and for winning the case with the RTB but €7,000 in compensation is not very good, to be frank, for the level of suffering they faced. It is not much of a deterrent either, if you think about it that way, and that needs to be looked at.

These are the conditions people are being forced into, and it is not just young people either, as we have all heard. A lot of older people are coming to our attention. In my area there is an eviction tsunami. A couple of months ago, in Dublin 15 alone, 115 families had registered with the local council that they had notices of termination. They are just the ones who told the council. We have been trying to assist people. I have the sheriff on speed dial on my phone. I never thought I would reach that level. It is a matter of trying just to get things put back until we can find there is no emergency accommodation in Dublin. I do not know if there is any discussion on that in the Dáil. People are just expected to go onto the streets. A lot of these people tend to have nobody else to support them, no near family members. We had one eviction in the Clonee area where the woman, who did nothing wrong in her entire life, was paying her rent, the landlord wanted to sell and the council would not acquire the property because the budget was used up. She ended up with the sheriff coming and being pulled out of the house in her dressing gown, onto the street. She actually spoke the same language as the bailiffs doing the evicting so she could hear everything they were saying and was appealing to them. She was treated brutally and manhandled. Those are the goings-on now all over the suburbs of Dublin and I am sure in many other counties as well. It is not even being brought to light in the media, so we have to bring it out to light in the Dáil. That is the level of what Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have created.

I will back this up with facts and show that it is not just anecdotes. According to a survey from myhome.ie, just 7% saw any difference in housing policy from this Government. They had no hope whatsoever. The eviction rate had gone up in quarter 3 of last year by 35% in preparation for these new laws, and rents are now one third higher than they were at pre-Covid levels and two thirds higher than the Celtic tiger peak. The Government is benefiting landlords at every single turn.

Then we have a social crisis where we cannot get essential workers whom we need to bring down the CDNT waiting lists, to work in the schools, etc. We had one case in Dublin 15 where four teachers were evicted from the one campus. There were two schools together on the campus. Four teachers got evicted at the one time. That is what is facing people. I absolutely despair for young people now. I was talking to an American who has lived here for a year and they cannot believe the housing crisis in this country. They are just gobsmacked by the lack of action and the lack of care or thought about it. They have not seen anything like it in the US, which is the belly of the beast of capitalism, as we know. They just could not believe that it is continuing the way it is. Our nieces, our nephews and our children are ending up in Australia. This Bill will only make it worse. It has all been said here tonight. If you allow a landlord to introduce new rules for new tenants, they will create new tenants. That is just a reality. It is an iron law of economics that that will happen. The Government is giving that power because it wants more vulture funds and more investment funds and that is its prime consideration.

Albert Dolan (Galway East, Fianna Fail)
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I rise to support the residential tenancies Bill 2026. I will begin by acknowledging the work of the Minister, Deputy Browne, and the Minister of State, Deputy Cummins, in bringing forward this legislation, which tries to do something Ireland has struggled to do for far too long, that is, strike a fair balance between tenant protection and rental supply. I will say this clearly: we need that balance because the truth is that the system we currently have is not serving anybody properly. It is not serving the renters, who want security and certainty, and it is not serving landlords, who want clarity, fairness and a rental sector that is not constantly changing rules midstream.

The Bill gets a number of things right.

First, it introduces for the first time a national approach to rent regulation. Instead of the patchwork of rent pressure zones, we move to a more consistent, national framework where rent increases are linked to inflation using the consumer price index, CPI, and, critically, there remains a cap of 2% per annum to protect tenants during high inflation. Second, it strengthens tenant security through the introduction of rolling six-year tenancies of minimum duration for new tenancies, and that is being created from 1 March 2026. That is a major step in giving renters the stability that so many families are crying out for. Third, the Bill provides a pathway for new investment in supply, particularly in apartments, by linking rent increases for new apartments to inflation only, which is designed to support new building and attract investment into the sector.

There is, therefore, a lot in the Bill to support. I support it because it is rooted in the reality we cannot ignore. If we do not grow supply, rents will remain high and pressure will remain unbearable. I also commend the Minister on recognising something many in this House have been slow to acknowledge, namely that a rental market where rents cannot be reset between tenancies becomes one that people exit. That is why the Bill provides for rent to reset to market rates in specific circumstances, particularly where tenancies have ended or between tenancies at the end of a six-year period while also putting safeguards in place to prevent economic evictions. That is the correct direction of travel.

I also want to raise concerns that have been brought to my attention and that I am hearing repeatedly in my clinics in Galway East. I want to raise them honestly and frankly because these concerns are real. In my clinics, I meet people who are not corporate landlords, not vulture landlords or not large investors but ordinary people, such as a farmer who bought a small house years ago for retirement income, a couple with one rental property to support a mortgage or a widow who rents out a property to top up her pension. These are people who did what the State told them to do for decades.

Ruth Coppinger (Dublin West, Solidarity)
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It is a bad reflection if they need to do that in Ireland.

Albert Dolan (Galway East, Fianna Fail)
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They invested, provided rental homes and helped supply. They are coming to me with one fear above all others. They are afraid they will lose control of their own property. Vacant possession matters. I want to put this plainly. It is absolutely right that tenants have security. It is absolutely right that we restrict no-fault evictions. It is also vital, however, that property owners can have vacant possession of their asset if they choose to sell, especially small landlords. For many small landlords, that property is not a business. It is their pension, their safety net, their retirement plan and their family's long-term security. While the Bill recognises that a property can be sold at any time with a tenant in situ, we have to be honest about what that means in practice.

I want to raise a very practical point being raised with me again and again, which is that if small landlords are forced, in effect, to sell with tenants in situ, the valuation of their property will be crippled. This will be for two reasons. First, the buyer pool collapses, so if a property is sold with tenants in situ, it is no longer a home for a young couple to buy but only an investment asset. That means the only buyers are investors, which is a far smaller pool. Second, the properties become valued on yield. Here is the reality. For a small landlord with one property, after tax, maintenance, insurance and compliance costs, and after the risk that comes with the system, the yield is low. For large investment funds, however, the yield calculation is completely different. They can buy and sell portfolios at scale. They can spread costs. They have professional management, better financing and better tax structuring. We are creating, and I say this respectfully, a situation where the State risks pushing small landlords out while strengthening the position of large-scale corporate ownership. I think that would be the worst outcome.

The Bill does recognise a distinction between small landlords and large landlords and that is welcome but I urge the Minister to be extremely careful that, in practice, we do not end up with a system where large landlords have disproportionate ownership of the rental market and small landlords face the same practical consequences but without the scale, resources or tax efficiency to survive it. If we lose the small landlord sector, we lose supply and flexibility in rural Ireland.

From a rural Ireland perspective, if we lose the small landlords, they will not be coming back. We sometimes think institutional investment will step in and take their place but in these small towns, there is no institutional investment. No institutional investment is coming to east Galway. We are not going to see large apartment blocks. As a result, when a small landlord sells and gets out of the market, that rolling rental supply we depend on in our towns is going to be gone. These properties might be for somebody who needs one for a year, somebody who moves into an area to settle or a worker looking to relocate. These are all examples of people who need to rent in our areas and there will not be a rental supply if it is sold and gone.

Verona Murphy (Wexford, Independent)
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I thank the Deputy. I call Deputy Ó Muirí.

Naoise Ó Muirí (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael)
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I welcome the legislation before the House and I commend the Minister and the Minister of State on their work in progressing it. The need for reform in the sector itself is clear. The legislation, as my colleagues said, seeks to strike a balance between strengthening protections for tenants while also ensuring landlords stay in the rental market. However, there are a few issues I believe must be addressed before this legislation is enacted.

I welcome the report laid before the Dáil by my colleague, Deputy Micheál Carrigy, Cathaoirleach of the housing committee. I believe the recommendations in this report need to be thoroughly considered by the Department. Recommendation number seven is particularly important. This proposes that the distinction between large and small landlords should be reconsidered to account for the number of properties owned rather than the number of tenancies held. According to that data most recently published by the RTB, over half of landlords are currently associated with five or fewer tenancies. They are not large corporate entities. In many cases, they are self-employed workers or PAYE employees who have invested their own money in a property as an alternative to a pension, using rental income for deposits and committing to mortgages spanning 20 to 30 years.

I would go further than the committee's recommendation. It does not make sense that a small- or medium-sized landlord with four or five tenancies should be treated the same way as a corporate landlord. Small landlords are a core component of our housing system, whether some like it or not. There are over 240,000 private tenancies on the housing register, with almost half of those associated with small landlords. Five as a level is probably a good place at which to set that distinction. I understand it has to be set somewhere but it has to be set very carefully. We have to be careful in terms of striking that balance.

Another concern raised with me relates to families where a relative has entered long-term care. In particular, there does not seem to be an exception under the legislation that would allow a tenancy to be terminated following the death of a landlord whose family home had been rented out, effectively, to provide for the cost of care. While I understand the Department is going to look at issues around the fair deal scheme in this regard, we need to ensure that families with similar, effectively private, arrangements outside that scheme will also be protected in this way.

I ask that the Minister urgently examine these issues over the coming days and weeks, recognising that these changes are intended to come into effect urgently from next month and that many families are understandably concerned. We have to get this right, not just for tenants, but for the long-term stability and viability of the rental sector as a whole.

Darren O'Rourke (Meath East, Sinn Fein)
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I stand in firm opposition to this destructive legislation. It is the most profound change to the regulation of the private rental sector in a decade and will have a severe impact on renters across the State. At a time when families are already crushed by a cost-of-living crisis, this Bill is not a reset; it is a surrender. The rent-hike Bill of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael will allow vulture funds and big landlords to hike up the rents of 60,000 people every year. It surrenders their security to the profit motives of vulture funds and institutional investors. That is the fact and the reality.

The core of this Bill, the so-called market reset, allows landlords to exploit the gap between tenancies, hiking rents to exorbitant, so-called market rates. This is not policy; it is profiteering. Analysis shows this will claw extra thousands of euro from renters annually, pushing more people into poverty and insecurity. In Meath East already, two-bedroom apartments go for in the region of €2,000 to €2,600. What we are faced with here are rents far in excess of that, rents that will be simply unaffordable. The Government's duty is to protect citizens and not portfolios. Instead of cutting and freezing unaffordable rents, this Bill deliberately fuels the crisis. We must reject it entirely. We must defend existing protections and fight for a system where housing is a home and not just a commodity for corporate profit. We need to end the rip-off, ban increases and make rents affordable.

Seasaimid le chéile. Stop Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael's rent hike Bill.

Donnchadh Ó Laoghaire (Cork South-Central, Sinn Fein)
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Two things occur to me in relation to this Bill, which I strongly oppose. It is a very dangerous Bill that will cause huge hardship for an awful lot of people. Listening to some of the contributions over the course of this afternoon, I have felt like I am in a parallel universe. The first thing to say is that there must be prioritisation here. There must be a recognition of what is fundamental here. I believe in rules that are fair and I believe that adequate resources should be provided to ensure that decisions are enforced where landlords have legitimate grievances. However, we are treating the two considerations as equal when these are people's homes. They are where people live. When they are evicted, they cannot find accommodation and potentially end up homeless for extended periods of time. Treating the two considerations as if they are roughly equivalent makes no sense to me. The rules should absolutely be fair, enforceable and applied. Resources are needed for that but to treat these considerations as one and the same is wrong.

This legislation is based on an assumption that is completely untrue, which is that there is a functional market. There is no functional market. The rental market is completely dysfunctional. It is broken and has been for a really long time. The Minister of State is talking about the new tenancies that are going to be established. With the complications involved in these five new different types of tenancies, it will be impossible for landlords and tenants to work out what to do. These new tenancies are going to be matched to market rents, as if market rents are not completely out of reach for a huge number of people. There are tenants out there who are paying €1,600, €1,700 and up to €2,000 in rent, depending on where they are. Some of them are paying childcare fees on top of that, along with a million other things. How are those people supposed to make ends meet? This creates an incentive for people to be moved out of properties and new tenancies established. In that case, in Cork, you are talking about a difference of €308 in the county as a whole and €278 in the city. Over the course of a year, that is thousands of euro. It is a huge blow to people. It makes no sense whatsoever.

Michael Collins (Cork South-West, Independent Ireland Party)
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We are again being told that these are only technical amendments and that nothing is changing. However, in places like west Cork and in Killarney, County Kerry, next door to us, that reassurance rings hollow. These sections lock in a planning regime that was never designed with coastal rural communities in mind. They copper-fasten restrictions on short-term letting that hit family homes, small operators and tourism-dependent villages while doing nothing to address the real causes of the housing crisis.

In west Cork, short-term letting is not about speculation or corporate landlords; it is about ordinary households renting a room or a home for part of the year to keep local tourism alive and to make ends meet in areas with limited employment options. This Bill preserves a one-size-fits-all approach that treats rural communities in the same way as inner-city Dublin. It does not deliver housing supply, tackle vacancy and dereliction or distinguish between large-scale operators and local families. We will be proposing amendments. I hope they will be accepted. We could then sit around the table to work on delivery. The Bill will remove accommodation from the tourism market, damage local economies and undermine livelihoods across west Cork, all without producing a single affordable home. Until the Government recognises that rural Ireland needs a different and balanced approach, I cannot support measures that punish rural communities while failing to solve the housing issue.

Part of this Bill relates to short-term lets. The situation in that regard is very serious. I have seen it myself. This legislation is going to come before the people next May. People the length and breadth of west Cork have been asking me about it because we depend on short-term lets. I am genuinely not sure where the Minister of State's constituency is.

John Cummins (Waterford, Fine Gael)
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It is Waterford, which is very dependent on tourism.

Michael Collins (Cork South-West, Independent Ireland Party)
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It is Waterford. Waterford depends on tourism so the Minister of State will know all about it. It is a lovely place. Many people depend on the little bit of income from Airbnb, operating bed and breakfast accommodation or letting out a second home or whatever for the short term. They have very serious concerns. They will now have to fill out a form and be registered. They have no problem with registering. They are not afraid to be registered. However, there are very serious concerns about having to seek planning permission. According to this Bill, they will not be allowed to operate without it. That is on the form as of now. Perhaps the Government is going to change it. That is where my amendments will come into play. If that is not changed, these places will end up being shut down. That is an astonishing attack on tourism. We cannot let that happen here. It looks like it is happening. We have been pleading about this for the last year and a half here in the Dáil, in the audiovisual room and in other places. Meeting after meeting has been held on this issue across the road in Buswells Hotel. The Government is treating Courtmacsherry in the very same way as Dublin 4. That does not work and the Minister of State should not even dream that it does.

A woman in west Cork told me last week that she has packed up because of the terror of this legislation going through. She said that she and her friend had packed up. They said to hell with it; they are sick of it. Will the Minister of State listen to me for two minutes for God's sake? If he does not, no one else will. This woman told me that this meant ten bedrooms gone in her corner of the community. She is not going into the business again. She has packed up because of this legislation. She talked about the number of people who had booked rooms with her who went into Clonakilty or Bandon to have a bit of food or a pint. They used local taxis and the local transport bus to come and go. The Government is going to block all of that with this legislation. Will the Minister of State wake up? This is not going to work.

If it does go through, the Government parties will be run out of west Cork in the next election. The Minister of State keeps nodding over there but I will send this on to him. I am having a public meeting at 7 p.m. next Friday in O'Donovan's Hotel on this issue alone. I will stand by the tourism sector in west Cork. I will stand by the people of west Cork. I will not turn my back on them. The Minister of State keeps nodding over there but I will send it on to him.

John Cummins (Waterford, Fine Gael)
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I am not nodding.

Michael Collins (Cork South-West, Independent Ireland Party)
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I will send it on to him so that he can have a look. If I am wrong, I will stand up and thank the Minister of State very much.

John Cummins (Waterford, Fine Gael)
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I am sorry but, just because the Deputy is saying I am nodding, it does not mean I am. I know he is saying that for the camera but I am not nodding.

Michael Collins (Cork South-West, Independent Ireland Party)
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I am not saying it for the camera. I am saying it for the people of west Cork. How dare you insult the people of west Cork? You should not dare open your mouth like that. If you do not know what you are doing, you should not be there at all. How dare you say that? The people of west Cork are going to lose their income. They are crying in my offices. They are crying without a house because the Government cannot supply them with one. God almighty, what is wrong with you? I had a lovely girl in front of me yesterday. After many years, she had got an eviction notice the day before. I said that she had not slept since she got it and she said that she had not and that she could not sleep with the worry. Another woman told me she cannot get social housing because she and her partner both work. She was crying in my office on Saturday because they cannot get a home. We have a serious crisis and instead of dealing with it the Government is attacking the tourism sector.

Paul Lawless (Mayo, Aontú)
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I have very serious concerns in relation to the legislation. If I could have the Minister of State's attention very briefly, I would greatly appreciate it because there are significant concerns. This legislation will not bring about stability or the balance the Minister of State has outlined. It is actually causing the flight of landlords. That is what is happening. It has accelerated the exodus of landlords from the market, which is causing immense difficulty for constituents and renters right across this country, including in my own constituency of Mayo. Small landlords are leaving the rental market and it is not because they want to but because of this Government legislation and its six-year tenancies. The evidence is overwhelming. That is why I am asking the Minister of State to reconsider. The legislation must be reconsidered. It is designed for large institutional investors. It is not designed for accidental landlords or people who are entering retirement and who may seek to sell down the line. For many such landlords, it actually incentivises vacancy.

The number of eviction notices issued has increased by 35%. In quarter 3 of 2025, over 5,500 termination notices were issued. In the same quarter of the previous year, the figure was 4,000. Most of the landlords who are issuing these notices are intending to sell and they are not being replaced. The RTB has concerns in that regard as well. Some 56% of homes that are sold are sold by landlords who are leaving the market. Just 9% are being bought by investors. There has been a significant reduction in the number of rental properties available.

7 o’clock

I believe this legislation is going to create more difficulty for renters because it is designed for pension funds and investment funds. I have spoken to landlords who are very concerned. The restrictions on small landlords are very concerning. Financial hardship has been mentioned. I looked at the legislation, which states small landlords may only sell where they are servicing a debt in excess of 15% of the asking price. This is causing concern. I have spoken to landlords who have attended my clinic and who are raising this as a concern. I spoke to another landlord, who is a grandfather. His grandchild is in Australia but he will be coming home. This man said he is going to leave the property vacant.

This is the reality on the ground and the unintended consequences of the Bill will be great. It will be known as the legislation that caused the flight of small landlords, which has already been happening but it will cause an acceleration of it. I ask that this aspect about small landlords be reconsidered. It is primarily designed for large institutional investors. There are a number of cases where we will see homes being left vacant as a result of this. I ask that it be reconsidered and that amendments to the legislation be considered to reduce the number of properties that will remain vacant as a result of this.

Richard O'Donoghue (Limerick County, Independent Ireland Party)
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There is an old saying, "fail to prepare, prepare to fail". This legislation, with all its intentions of what the Government wants it to do, has not taken everything into account. Part of the legislation mentions short-term lets. What constitutes a short-term let? Is it a week, a month, two months or three months? The likes of Airbnb have been on about this to me and my colleague in Independent Ireland, Deputy Collins, asking us what it is. Last year we spoke about the planning permission rules for Airbnb and buildings that for the past number of years had been used as short-term lets for holidaymakers who contributed to local towns and communities. This goes partly to short-term lets but what is a short-term let?

We have people who want to build their own houses. If we go to Wexford, we have people who will be looking for lettings while their houses are being retrofitted after flooding. What happens there? A problem has been caused by the Government failing to dredge the rivers, which has meant it flooded people's houses to protect different species. It could have put a plan in place to dredge the rivers in different sequences, protecting the wildlife and protecting people's homes. These same people's homes will no longer be able to get insurance because they have been flooded. The Government is coming up with a task force for this. This brings us back to the tenancy Bill and how long a property is let. How long will the houses of these people which have been flooded be out of action? If they rent a property, will they be caught in a situation whereby they might want to rent for a year but the landlord will say they cannot do this because it has to be based on the tenancy Bill?

Rents will skyrocket as will the price of student accommodation. I have a family member in college. The hardest thing we had to do this year was get him accommodation. Four of us with family members who are students in Galway came together to rent a property. We had to pay for it from three months prior to the start of the college year to make sure they had a place when they were going to college because of the rental market. All I can say is that come March every auctioneer in the country will be weighed down with rental properties going up for sale. There will be rental properties going up for sale because people will say enough is enough. Every year something changes.

We have some fantastic landlords but we also have some bad ones. We have fantastic people looking after people in their communities, keeping the rent low to make sure people can afford it because they are looking after the property. Now we have this Bill, which will equalise it to market value. Somebody could be charging one and a half times the price of someone else. Now they will say that as they are getting one and a half times the price of what someone else is getting, that person will have to bring their rent up to meet it. This means the person in the rental property will be paying more. It will put more pressure on the landlords because they will say their property needs to make more.

The Bill states that people who have four properties or more will be locked into six-year tenancies and anybody with three properties or fewer will not. This is one thing the Bill is bringing in. What needs to be brought in here is 100% security for people. Anyone who had problem tenants had a massive problem with the RTB as people were left in the property for up to two years. This was not only private landlords as local authorities have had the same issue. A lot of people have a second home because it might have been left to them. A parent might have passed away and left them property. They might have decided they wanted to house somebody local in the area to help them and they are all being branded as landlords.

From the point of view of good landlords and good tenants, we need to put in place a reward system. This system being put in place will only make rents higher. It will put the landlords who are profiteering on a massive scale at an advantage and small landlords will want to get out. All the tariffs are being put in place in a one-Bill-fits-all. Reward good people, reward good tenants and reward good landlords and then deal with the people who are doing badly.

Paul Gogarty (Dublin Mid West, Independent)
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I support the Bill and I must acknowledge that many of the proposals are welcome in principle. Tenants across the country, and particularly in my constituency of Dublin Mid-West, have had a torrid time over the past 20 years with many people facing termination of tenancy with few viable options for alternative accommodation. We do need more protection and a simpler and more transparent system. While the Bill has some positive elements, I do not think it will go far enough. It will not lead to more homes being built or more homes in the right areas with transport, education, community and other facilities alongside them.

The core problem in Dublin is the shortage of supply. In my constituency, more than any other part of Dublin, we have seen huge tracts of land already zoned. We are carrying the load, with tens of thousands of housing units zoned but insufficient building taking place. Alongside this, thanks to almost every political party in this Chamber, appalling decisions were made to benefit developers but not the people living in the areas who need the facilities. These areas will be ghettoised without proper transport, education and community infrastructure. We had a chance with Clonburris strategic development zone but a hames was made of it but this is another day's debate.

In terms of assisting with supply, nothing in the Bill addresses barriers to construction such as costs, slow delivery, planning and other aspects. We have the gradual disappearance of smaller landlords, the type of people who are more likely to charge affordable rents in return for a reliable and, in one sense of the phrase, low-maintenance tenant. Instead, we are pushing the boat out for investor landlords, making it easier for them to hike up their rents.

I get the logic, and I support the 2% rent freeze, but there is still a real risk that some of the measures could push up rents even higher. By exempting new units from certain caps, the Bill could end up creating a two-tier market, as others have said, whereby new developments can charge a lot more, even allowing for the consumer price index. This is something that will continue as long as demand massively outstrips supply and we could do more.

There is also a credible concern that the Bill may paradoxically undermine security of tenure despite its stated aim of enhancing it. Restrictions on terminations are very welcome but they sit alongside provisions that may encourage landlords to reset tenancies more frequently than before in order to access the higher market rents.

If the financial incentive tends to become stronger than the so-called regulatory disincentive, then tenants may find themselves less secure. We could see certain types of landlords and institutional landlords being more active in looking at ways at getting around the regulations or being flexible in terms of the definitions, such as for "refurbishment". For example, one of the grounds is termination for sale. The Bill does not require proof of actual timelines for listing the sale or specify the penalties for failure to complete a sale. That means a landlord can credibly issue a notice to sell even if it is not ultimately completed. We need to get tighter on that.

Regarding the termination for substantial refurbishment, the Bill does not go too much into the definition of "substantial", so a landlord could plan works, provide contractor quotes, carry out limited works and then relet at a higher market rate. Where are the enforcement and inspection to make sure that a loophole is not going to be made? Then there are the own-use or family-use grounds, which are difficult to disprove. If the Bill does not require proof of occupation after the tenant leaves, minimum occupation periods and RTB follow-up checks, then there are going to be a lot of cracks to be falling through.

The RTB is already not sufficiently funded. I know of one very dodgy landlord operating in my constituency who has multiple units that I have reported for not being registered with the RTB and for other planning issues. I am not naming names, but I am pointing out that two years later nothing has happened. That is an unfortunate situation. We will see the boundaries of the law being stretched unless we have rigorous enforcement. That is something we need to look at. Can the Minister of State give any guarantees that between Committee and Report Stages we are going to have actual guarantees for the enforcement of these rules? He might also respond to the point about the resourcing of the various bodies that will have to follow through on this. I have to acknowledge there is a lot of good stuff in the Bill but we need to make sure it is actually going to work rather than creating loopholes and leading to people paying higher rents down the line.

Séamus McGrath (Cork South-Central, Fianna Fail)
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I thank the Minister of State for being here and facilitating the discussion this evening. I commend him and the Minister, Deputy Browne, on having the courage to undertake a fundamental reform of the rental sector, which was long overdue. It is critically important that reform has taken place in accordance with what is proposed here.

As we know, there is a chronic shortage of properties in the rental sector. Demand far exceeds supply and in a situation like that, there will of course be rising rents. They will continue to rise unless an intervention is made and the Government is seeking to do that. The Minister and the Minister of State have had the conviction of their beliefs to try to set about that reform. I am not saying it is perfect or absolutely rock solid in terms of what is on the table, but it is a good effort. We certainly need to listen to the proposals that are coming forward here this evening and tomorrow from the floor of the Dáil in relation to this legislation and take on board good measures. Before we pass this, we have to ensure it is done correctly because we have to strike the right balance and this is all about striking a balance. That phrase is overused, but it is critical we strike the balance between the rights of tenants and the needs of landlords because that is the only thing that will deliver a functional rental sector.

There is a lot in the legislation to protect tenants. If we take the case of a tenant under a small landlord, for example, they will have far greater certainty now with a tenancy of six-year duration. They will, of course, have the protection of the rent pressure zone, which is critical, and that security of tenure is very important. Indeed, there will be additional resources for the Residential Tenancies Board so that disputes can be resolved in a much timelier manner, which is critically important. Equally, tenants under large landlords, according to the legislation, will also have the protections of the rent pressure zone and effectively ultimate security of tenure because no-fault evictions are effectively banned under the large landlord proposal. That is very significant for those tenants.

There is the category of new apartments after 1 March. That is designed to stimulate investment and activity around the delivery of additional apartments. It must be remembered that these are new tenancies for new apartments. They do not exist at present and it is all about adding to the supply, which is very important so that we can increase the supply overall because, ultimately, that is the only thing that will help moderate rent prices.

The set of proposals before us offer a lot to landlords as well insofar as they give policy certainty. The resourcing of the Residential Tenancies Board is also very important to landlords and in certain circumstances the Bill gives the right to reset rents, which is something that landlords have called for. Again, it is about striking that balance. If we do not have both sides to this equation, if we do not have tenants and landlords as part of the rental sector that are reasonably satisfied with the sector, it will not function correctly and I believe that is what the Government is setting out to do.

Overall, there are ongoing issues. I sit on the housing committee and I have listened to those who are advocating for property owners, such as the Irish Property Owners Association, and those who are advocating for tenants, such as Threshold. We have to listen to the points they are making and that they have made at committee. I know they have been making submissions in recent days as well. It is important we get this right before the Bill passes through the Houses because it is one opportunity we have to get this right. Valid points are being made on both sides of the debate. We have to listen to them and try to get it right.

One point I want to highlight tonight, which I have made previously, relates to the definition of a small landlord as having three properties or fewer. We need to look at that because it has the potential to drive many of our Irish, domestic landlords out of the market and that would be regrettable. We need a mix in the rental sector. We need landlords that are domestic and Irish in our towns and villages across the country as well as those institutional investors that may come in with international finance. Defining a landlord who may own four or five houses in the same category as an institutional investor that has hundreds of apartments, for example, is not appropriate and should be something we are prepared to look at. It is important we have a mix of landlords across the sector. While many institutional investors will invest in places like Dublin and some of our other cities, they will not do so across the country in all towns and villages and we need landlords in all our towns and villages because there are tenants there who have needs and demands for rental accommodation. That is something we need to look at.

It is important to point out we are talking about new tenancies. Existing tenancies are not impacted by the proposals before us and that is a fundamental point. There has been a lot of confusion regarding the proposals in recent weeks and months, and I believe notices to quit have issued on the basis of misinformation. It is very important that at this point we continue to set the record straight in that we are talking about new tenancies after 1 March and new relationships between landlords and tenants. Whatever side of the argument one may be on, nothing is dramatically going to change after 1 March. It will take time for this to flush its way through the system because existing tenancies are not impacted and that is a fundamental point that has to be made. It is important that we communicate that message and that we try to take on board the proposals that are coming.

The overall fundamental issue at present with the rental sector, as all public representatives in the House know, is the inability of tenants to find accommodation. That is the overall issue. Any set of proposals that aims to increase the supply and tries to rebalance the supply of properties against the present demand is ultimately what is needed, and that is what the legislation before us seeks to do. It is not perfect, and there is time to bring about certain changes to it before it passes, but overall it is a good effort and I commend the Minister of State, the Minister and the Department on bringing it forward. I urge them to listen to the submissions that are being made on both sides of the argument, from those representing tenants and from property owners. Let us get this set of proposals as right as possible before we sign the Bill into law.

Ruairí Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein)
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It is hard to call this anything other than the Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael rent-hike Bill. This is going to allow vulture funds and big landlords to hike up the rents of 60,000 people every year. That means thousands of euro extra will be paid in rent from 1 March. It is hard to believe. In fairness, Deputy Ó Laoghaire said it earlier. Whatever about the setting of the rules, there is a huge level of confusion on the part of landlords and we are going to have confusion from tenants right through to landlords.

The Minister is starting as if we are dealing with a fully functional market, whereas I thought we all accepted that it is utterly dysfunctional, broken, and not working for anybody out there in any way, shape or form. Whatever small protections were provided by the rent pressure zones, they are gone. We are talking about a complete reset to market rents. I would have thought we all accepted - certainly I would accept, as well as a considerable number Members present and people outside on the street would accept - that rents are absolutely through the roof. They are utterly unaffordable. Now we are talking about resetting rents with no protections whatsoever.

We talk about improved protections into the future, but how do we deal with the fact that rents are utterly unaffordable at the minute, yet we are allowing for new tenancies that are going to be at market rent? A long time ago we all thought there would have been some control on the market, but I cannot see it.

The average price of a three-bedroom house in Louth in the third quarter of 2025 was €1,966, which was an 8.7% increase on the year before. Obviously the protections we did have were insufficient. I can only imagine what we will be looking at next year. I dread to think. We see the usual stuff when we check daft.ie. In Dundalk, the cost of a three-bedroom house is €2,100 per month. It is €1,150 per month for a studio apartment. It is €1,850 per month for a three-bedroom house. A two-bedroom house is €1,550 per month. It goes on, but not that far because the other thing we realise is that nobody can get a rental.

Another issue is that all of us are inundated with people who have received notices to quit in the past while. We know the issues that arise for Louth County Council and other local authorities in trying to find a solution. We are talking with a lot of young people - but they are not all young - who are in severe circumstances, where they are about to be put out of their home. In some cases, the landlord is leaving and does allow an element of overholding. If it were not for that, we would have had a complete disaster.

Did we ever imagine we would be looking at the current homeless figures? We used to be shocked when we were talking about 5,000, then it was 10,000, and now we are talking about 15,000. That is before we talk about the disgrace in relation to the percentage of children.

Paula Butterly (Louth, Fine Gael)
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I thank the Deputy.

Ruairí Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein)
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I do not see any solutions here for affordable and social housing. I do not see anything to stop the increases, or any move towards what we are calling for, which is a ban on rent increases for at least three years.

Paula Butterly (Louth, Fine Gael)
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I thank the Deputy.

Ruairí Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein)
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We accept that the market is dysfunctional and that these rules are not going to work. The Minister needs to do better. This is far too late.

Carol Nolan (Offaly, Independent)
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There are very serious and valid concerns regarding the amendment to the residential tenancies legislation and the impact, particularly on private property rights and small-scale property owners or landlords. I have met many of these small-scale property owners in my offices in Birr and Tullamore and they are telling me quite clearly that are leaving the rental market. I have also met tenants who have received a notice-to-quit letter. I know this is as a result of the legislation coming before us, which is flawed and unfairly punishes small property owners.

What are we, as TDs, to do? How are we to advise tenants who cannot get access to social housing because their income is too high? There are no affordable housing schemes and now there are fewer properties to rent. I know for a fact that many properties are up for sale in towns like Birr, Banagher, Tullamore and Edenderry. That would not have happened were it not for this flawed legislation, which goes about unfairly punishing small-scale property owners. It is totally unfair.

I have seen good people who have been in the rental market for a long time. They have been very fair with their tenants and everything has worked very well. Now we have an absolute disaster unfolding. Unless the Minister can get to grips with this, change course quickly and amend this legislation, we are going to have an absolute catastrophe in terms of a greater shortage of rental properties, which I can see first hand. I am still getting a huge volume of emails from property owners, many of whom are in the process of selling their homes. They are gone out of the market now thanks to this flawed legislation.

I hope the Government will see sense. The way it is going about this is wrong. There should have been fairness and balance. I am all for having rental properties and fairness for tenants, but we have to be fair with the small-scale property owner as well. The proposed framework represents a disproportionate appropriation of rights from private citizens who have always paid their taxes and who have invested their savings, in some cases their life savings, in the rental market. The move towards rolling six-year tenancies and the virtual elimination of no-fault evictions for many providers effectively strips owners of their right to manage their own assets, which in many cases they worked hard to purchase. I am talking about the small-scale property owner with three or fewer properties. It is unfair and it needs to be changed.

We have a situation whereby we have asset seizure by regulation. By preventing owners from reclaiming their property for sale or personal use until a six-year mark is reached, the Government is essentially freezing private capital. This legislation forces small-scale property owners to carry the social burden of housing provision at the expense of their own financial security and liquid assets to their investments and disincentivises the sector. The measures we have here in this flawed legislation do not just target vulture funds, they punish private citizens or individuals who have worked hard to provide quality housing, who have obeyed the laws, worked within the parameters of the RTB, and have been fair and good to their tenants. The message being sent here is that private property rights are secondary to political expediency. It is because there is a crisis that the Minister is being too rash with decisions here. The legislation is not properly thought out. I am asking for an urgent review of the Bill before we have an absolute disaster.

Property owners deserve a fair return and the fundamental right to control their own assets without undue State interference. The control is overbearing and it is pushing people out. It is forcing small-scale property owners out of the market. Many small-scale property owners have also told me that the security of tenure for some cannot come at the cost of other citizens, in terms of security of ownership. There has to be a balance. No balance is struck here. From what I can see, the Minister has made rash and ill-thought out decisions. I ask him to again meet with small property owners and the organisation that represents them because the Bill is just not going to be a success. We are going to have chaos.

Will the Minister of State tell me what I should tell tenants who are coming in to me very upset because they cannot qualify for social housing? There are no affordable housing schemes in County Offaly. What do I tell the people who got on well with the property owner or landlord and everything went well and who lived happily in their house for many years,? Now we have this mess. We need solutions. We need affordable housing but we do not need to tackle this with the force being applied by the Minister. It is unfair. We should always ensure the rights of all are respected and upheld. This legislation will most certainly deepen the housing crisis. I am already seeing it with the volume of notice-to-quit letters, and the increase in properties for sale in many towns throughout Offaly. People have had enough. They are not going to be dictated to by the Government when they have worked hard, paid taxes all their lives and worked in jobs like teaching or nursing or as a garda. They are not going to be dictated to. It is unfair. The Bill needs to be reversed immediately. Thanks to this legislation, we are going to see an increase in homelessness due to the greater absence of rental properties in the market.

This legislation has to be urgently amended because it is not a solution. It is a disaster for tenants who do not qualify for social housing and it is an absolute disaster for the small-scale property owners, many of whom are disillusioned and have decided to leave the rental market and sell their properties. It is a disaster.

Danny Healy-Rae (Kerry, Independent)
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First, I want to make it crystal clear that I myself only own one house and I am not in the rental business or never have been. I want to make that absolutely clear. I only own one house.

I am very concerned about the six-year rule. I believe we are attempting to interfere with people's constitutional and democratic rights. People work very hard, early in the morning and late at night, to build or buy these homes and they have a constitutional right to determine how long they want to rent their house out for to tenants.

Tenants and landlords need each other - one as much as the other. For the most part, 70% or 80% of landlords and tenants are getting on damn fine without any interference from us and that is a fact. It is wrong to be forcing out honest good people with maybe one house, two houses or, at the very most, three houses. It is mostly one or two around Kerry. Since this story was being mooted in the second half of last year, an amount of people have come into my clinics or are on the phone day after day shivering. They are all get notices now because these landlords - I do not like calling them landlords but that is what they are talked about as - or house owners are getting out. That is a fact. In a way, I do not blame them because they are being forced into this where they will have to rent their houses for six full years. No one knows what way the situation will change. Six years is a very long time.

I will give the Minister of State two examples. There was a young fella who came home from Australia and he bought a house. He was going back to Australia and he made it clear he would be back home in Ireland in 12 months. Even though he made it clear at the outset, he did not get his house back for another year and a half. There was another person who rented out his house and found that he could not pay the bank for the house so he entered into a transaction. He sold his house. He had notice given to the tenant, who, by the way, was a consultant earning good money. The young fella needed to get his house back to pay the bank and to get out, but it took him three years to get that consultant out. He even went to the bother of locating another house for the consultant and the consultant came back and told him that his wife did not like that house so the poor fella who had his house sold was still paying the bank loan because he could not get the money from the fella that bought it since he could not give him vacant possession. That is what happened. I worry for people who meet clients like those after six years trying to get someone like that out of their houses.

There were several other things that we could do. Instead, we should be dealing with the vacant houses. They are all around us. We see them every day. I have asked the Government several times to do something like it is doing for the Ukrainians, that is, pay €600 tax free to the landlords that are renting those houses to them. They are getting them and our Irish people are not getting them in Kerry. That is what I am talking about - not up the country, around the country or elsewhere. I am talking about Killarney, Tralee, Dingle, Kenmare and all those places. What is happening there is that the Ukrainians will get the house before the Irish person because there is €600 tax free being put upfront by the State for them and we are not offering that - I asked the Government to do that - for Irish people. They are our own and they are in trouble. The Government could do that. That would tempt a lot of people not to leave their houses vacant. There are so many of them there.

The other problem that I have stated is the landlords are paying 50% tax, which is not fair. Other countries only allow for 30% tax, or maybe 27% or 28% tax. Regardless of what their income is or what other income they have besides the houses, that is what they would pay in income tax against whatever rent they are getting. We should be doing something like that. We have too many vacant houses around the country. We should be doing something with them.

It is unbelievable to see young girls coming in to my clinic who are after getting notice to quit and it is all because of this six-year rule. I saw a girl, while I was dealing with the few that were before her last week. I looked down the hall and she was absolutely shaking - every bit of her like an ivy leaf. I am hurt by that. We could be doing better some other way. The Minister and Minister of State may have a lot of work put into this but I would like to see them doing something about equalising the story of Irish people with the Ukrainians and I would like to see them doing a lot more about the vacant houses that are all around us. There are 54 houses from the top of Kenmare town, when you go out a small bit, all the way out to Kilgarvan, through Kilgarvan village, down Glenflesk until you finish up at the Kerry Way. On the side of the road, 54 houses are vacant and no one in them. They are grand houses. People need only step onto the road where the 270 bus is passing from Killarney to Kenmare, through Kilgarvan and through Glenflesk and they could go where they like on the rural transport.

The Government's plan to lock people who are renting houses into six-year tenancies is not going to work in Kerry. I say that because people are getting on to me every day. Trying to force people into six-year tenancies is not going to work.

The Government also has short-term lettings in its sight. I will say to the Minister and Ministers of State that this is another wrong direction before they go any farther with it. People have been at this for 20 years and they will not rent their houses long term for all the different reasons. The Government has not been clear or been honest with these people. They are telling them to go for planning permission, that they will get planning permission and to register with Bord Fáilte, and I say to the Minister and the Ministers of State that is false. They do not need to go for planning permission when they are more than seven years at it. They have planning acquired by being in the game for seven years. I ask the Minister of State to take stock of that.

I want him to know also what is happening about the tenant in situ scheme in Kerry. I have a number of times taken out officials from Kerry County Council to look at a house where the tenant has been asked to leave and their time is up. Invariably, they have told me that there is something wrong with the house and at the end of it, after a number of times doing this, they tell me they will buy no second-hand house, only a new house. It is not fair to be telling people that there is a tenant in situ scheme when it is not working in Kerry. Maybe it is working somewhere else.

It is good to see three Ministers listening to us because we only have a few minutes when we come in here. This six-year rule will not work. The Department will lose more houses than it will gain.

I asked the Minister and the Ministers of State about doing something for people who want to build their own house. We have this urban generated pressure clause in our planning system in Kerry that rules against people. It was supposed to prevent people from coming out the country from an urban setting but three, four or seven miles out, the people from that area cannot get permission on that.

Surely to God, we should be trying to do something for people who are asking for nothing but planning permission. They will borrow the money. If they have the money, they will build the house because they want to stay near their people, and be near them at the end of their days. We are being blocked from that; it is still a blockage.

I have been asking for this to be sorted out for three or four years. I asked the new Taoiseach and the new Ministers, but still, here we are, with nothing done about it. It is like the planning regulator can do what he likes, and he does not listen to the elected members of Kerry County Council. That is what has happened in Kerry. He insisted on extinguishing this area, way out from Killorglin, from Killarney, from Kenmare and from Dingle, so people could not get permission out in the countryside. That is what is happening.

Those people would not be looking to build a house. They have their own houses built long ago. They were just asking for planning permission on equal terms so their septic tanks would be right, or they would have access to the national road or whatever road they are coming out onto - the local road - so they would not cause accidents. They are not looking for anything exceptional. Even where there is an existing entrance, they are disallowed. Imagine that. In fairness to Leo Varadkar, when he was Taoiseach, he said a blanket ban could not be right, even though he signed the document that means people are being stopped from coming out on national primary or national secondary roads. In 2012, it was he who signed it into law. However, he said afterwards, when he became Taoiseach, that a blanket ban was wrong. Many of those people are trying to get onto those types of roads, but they are not allowed.

These are only small things. They could and should be sorted out between the Minister for housing, the planning regulator and the Taoiseach, if necessary, and all the other Ministers. They are simple things that could be sorted out.

I am worried that this will not work. Trying to stop short-term letting is not fair and will not work. Those people will not go into long-term letting. Saecula saeculorum- it will not happen. They have been with Airbnb for 20, 22 and 23 years, and they can prove they have been with it for more than seven years. Again, it is wrong to tell these people, or have housing departments in different places tell them, that they have to get planning permission or retention. That is not the truth. They can get registered, and they should be allowed to get registered, without doing this. This is the crucial point. If they go for planning and they are denied, they do not have the benefit of the 21 or 22 years they have been with Airbnb after that point. They have lost it because they went for planning. If they had planning, they would not have gone for it at that stage. They have to be very careful about that.

I am against these things and against this Bill as it is constituted. I will tell the truth and no back doors about it: if it is not changed, I will have to vote against this.