Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

What I want to say about this Bill is that I do not agree with the substance of it at all, that it is a fundamental mistake, that it is going in the wrong direction and that it will eventually, over time, reduce the amount of residential accommodation available for tenants in this country.

I do not agree with the new concept of tenancies of indefinite duration. What we are effectively doing is saying that landlords cannot, in any circumstance, recover possession of a property except on one of the limited grounds which exist at the moment for the curtailment of a section 4 tenancy. I do not believe it is in the interests of the rental sector generally that the establishment of a six-month tenancy should effectively, from now on, allow a tenant to stay in a property forever, subject to the landlord not being able to comply with one or other of the nominated grounds for termination. For instance, to say that a landlord can always obtain vacant possession when selling a premises, one has to bear in mind that in this day and age that is quite likely to give rise to significant capital gains tax. I do not think private landlords will come into the market at all as a result of this Bill. It is foolish and shortsighted.

I want to put on the record of the House that I speak as somebody who was brought up in a rent controlled house on Leeson St. Eventually, my parents succeeded to my grandparents' tenancy in that house. For a house which was on about a fifth of acre on Upper Leeson St., with its own drive 60 or 80 yards long, they paid £120 a year in rent to landlords who had effectively lost control of the property completely. The landlords were liable for external repairs. My parents were in a position whereby they were living in a house for which they were paying well below the market rent. Some of those who owned the house, who were relatives by descent, lived in New Zealand. I will not mention who they are, but they found themselves with an interest in very valuable land which was effectively out of their control. That situation would not exist under this Bill, but the amendment proposes to, yet again, take away from a landlord the right to estimate the rent he or she thinks is appropriate, having refurbished the premises substantially, and instead hand it over to somebody else to decide the value of the rent to be paid thereafter. This is all one-way traffic. It will all end up with a hugely diminished private rental sector.

Maybe the big American corporations that are building new apartments will think this is nothing to do with them, and maybe they are right. I am talking about people who have one house, apartment or piece of land anywhere in the country and, for whatever reason, have let it out. We are now proposing to tell them that they cannot agree with a tenant that he or she will only be there for eight years. The agreement has to state that the tenant will only be there for eight years if the landlord wants to have the property back for specified statutory purposes, such as sale, refurbishment, to give the property to a member of the family or whatever. In the Bill, references to family do not include nieces or nephews. All we are talking about is immediate members of the family.

What amuses me is that nobody has spoken up for the other side in this debate. I see where the Senator is coming from with her amendment. All of this is going to kill off an entire sector. It will expropriate an entire class of landlords. Whether it is the Minister's amendment to section 5 or this amendment, I want to put on the record of the House that I know I am in what is perhaps a minority of one, but I think this Bill is a disastrous mistake. In five or ten years' time, we will wonder how we ever created this situation.

I remind the Minister of State's Department of one thing. In 2009, the charity Threshold persuaded the then Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government, who succeeded me in Dublin South-East, John Gormley, to introduce regulations which ended the possibility of leaving a house in bedsits. He introduced a regulation under the Housing Act which made it impossible or unlawful to let rooms in a house unless they had their own bathroom and kitchen. Precisely why that should have been done when house sharing is permissible, as long as everybody is a tenant of the whole house, I do not know, but the result was that between 10,000 and 20,000 people on the lowest end of the private rental ladder, such as students, elderly people, single people and people who were separated lost their homes because of a well-intentioned change. Most of the houses on the road in Ranelagh where I live were in bedsits. They were all cleared out to become trophy homes for the rich and wealthy. Some of them now have huge price tags. A new development on the road will cost €2.5 million, a road which was, I can tell the House, most unfashionable when I went to live there.

All I am saying is that laws can be introduced which we think are great and are giving tenants all of the rights, but we must look around corners in the housing market. I believe that what we are doing in this Bill is a big mistake. That this is being done on foot of an agreed programme between the Government parties does not interest me in the slightest. In five or ten years' time, when the market diminishes and disappears, it will be realised that we switched the balance in favour of tenants too much and away from the landlords. Ordinary landlords who were letting houses and all the rest lost too many rights and fled the market. That is what is going to happen.