This Bill is a mirage because of what the Minister is talking about regarding security of tenure. There are things in the Bill about security of tenure that I would welcome were they in isolation, but we have a situation where the Government has a policy outcome whereby it has drafted a Bill that is so complicated and convoluted. It has made a policy decision that is essentially pulling in two separate directions. It claims it is trying to offer renters improved security of tenure but it is allowing landlords to reset the rent in between tenancies, which all but wipes that out. I will speak to amendments Nos. 7 and 8 in my name. I will also speak in support of amendment No. 2. My colleagues and I have all asked the Minister what modelling or analysis the Government has done in relation to this Bill. He comes back constantly and talks about the Housing Agency review into rent pressure zones. That review does not provide a predictable analysis as to what the effects of this Bill will be, which have been set out very well by the Deputies who spoke. I look at my city of Limerick, which the Minister of State and I both represent. We have had the highest level of rent increases in the entire country. I look at the supply issues we have and at what the Minister says about this Bill apparently incentivising supply, but the supply this Bill will incentivise, if it incentivises any, will be expensive, high-end, build-to-rent apartments. Such apartments do not get built in Limerick. With the market reset mechanism, the average length of a tenancy being three to three and half years, and the deficit we have in student specific accommodation in Limerick, I am concerned in respect of the city I represent that renters in Limerick will be on the hook for rent increases of at least 20%. I look back to the residential tenancies amendment Act the then Minister, Simon Coveney, introduced in 2016, which introduced the RPZ regime and the 4%. Flawed and all as that mechanism is and was, at the very least, when then Deputy Coveney introduced that legislation, modelling was done. Modelling was done that was targeted at areas with the highest and fastest rising rents. With this Bill, the Minister has not done anything to look at rent predictability. Not one witness who came before the Oireachtas joint committee on housing said this Bill would result in rents not rising any more or rents falling, and rents need to fall. They cannot rise any more. Renters cannot pay any more and every witness who came in told us clearly that this Bill will open tenants - tens of thousands of them - to absolutely extortionate rent increases. As my colleague Deputy Boyd Barrett pointed out earlier, there is a huge issue with HAP. The HAP limits, plus the homeless HAP and the discretionary HAP top-ups, do not go anywhere near what rents actually cost at the moment. With this Bill there will be a real return to economic evictions. People will be evicted because they cannot pay the rent. The truth behind this legislation is that it is for large institutional investors and big property developers. It is not for smaller SME builders. It is certainly not for renters. The Government constantly talks about balance. I find that term offensive in relation to this Bill because the balance is being struck against renters who cannot afford to pay what they are paying. As true as night follows day, the original Residential Tenancies Act that was introduced in 2004 has been amended 14 times. That means every 18 months on average the Residential Tenancies Act gets amended. I guarantee that the Minister or another Minister will be back because rents will rise to a level that the Minister and the Government will not be able to sustain. I have tabled amendment No. 7, the purpose of which is to require the Minister and the Government to conduct a review of the operation and effectiveness of all amendments made by this Bill to the Residential Tenancies Act to include findings and conclusions and that the review be laid before the Oireachtas. The Minister constantly talks about the need to incentivise supply, but we have not had any clarity about what this Bill will do, bar our analysis of what it will do to rent levels. There is no certainty that it will deliver anything like the level of supply needed to arrest the upward trend in rents. Rents have gone up by the bones of 100% in Dublin, for example, in over a decade and they will go up and up again. I simply do not believe this Bill will work. The Minister has not laid the evidence before us to show how this Bill will work. There needs to be a statutory duty on the Minister to examine what he has done, what the effects are and to come back to the House. Amendment No. 8 is similar. It is to insert a new section 3, with the heading "Impact forecast". It requires the Minister, within not more than six months after the Bill is passed, to publish a statement of the forecast of the impact of the Bill on market rents for the following years. The reason the Government has not done any modelling like this is that it knows that fundamentally what we are saying about rent levels, what we have calculated from looking at the RTB data, is what will transpire, if it is not worse, certainly in the short term. In this amendment, I am looking for the forecast to relate to a representative sample of tenancies. The general public, and most important the tens of thousands of renters who are terrified of the effects of this Bill, are entitled to know what the impact of these proposals will be, how much extra rent they will be forced to pay. It is beyond irresponsible to push a Bill like this through in less than 12 hours if the Minister cannot make such a forecast and if he does not and cannot model what the Bill will do, how it will affect rent levels in the coming decade, how much renters will pay and what the outcome of the Bill will be in terms of this so-called supply. We have asked questions like this nearly half a dozen times since the general scheme was published and I constantly get the same answer. What will we see with this Bill? For example, there will be new categories of landlord. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael backbenchers will come here tonight and they will not have the foggiest notion of what they are voting on because this Bill is so confusing and convoluted. For example, the restrictions for larger landlords should be applied universally because the tenants of larger landlords are usually tenants in build to rent properties, properties owned by institutional investors. Their rent is already unbelievably expensive and these properties are rarely, if ever, sold. For the tenants of the new so-called smaller landlords, not much effectively changes and the fact is that people should not be condemned to rent increases of 20% and possibly 30%. We will have a situation of the average length of a tenancy being between three and three and a half years, when it is ordinary working people, people on low incomes, who will have to, in some cases, pay 40%, 50% or 60% of their hard earned income on rent. This will absolutely crush them and the Minister has not set out at all empirically what this Bill will do to rents in the private rental sector. As I said earlier, more of this was done when Simon Coveney introduced the Bill at the end of 2016 which introduced RPZs.

Sentiment score: 0.02

We want evidence for this legislation.

Sentiment score: 0.08

It is not true.

Sentiment score: -0.33

I would love if my amendment was addressed. I would love that.

Sentiment score: 0.64

They will not be able to afford to rent.

Sentiment score: 0.00

The Minister still has not addressed my amendment.

Sentiment score: 0.00

The Minister did not meaningfully address my amendments in his response to them. He spoke about Standing Order 197. The types of reports referenced under that Standing Order came in as part of political reform in 2011. They are often delayed, sometimes for two, three or four years in respect of certain legislation. God knows where we will be four years from now. There is no proper, thorough and standardised approach to how these reports are done. In 2017, the Oireachtas Library and Research Service did a very good analysis of the reports. It found they had been done in a very ad hoc way and that no committee has undertaken a review of any enacted legislation on foot of a post-enactment report. The reason I brought forward these amendments is that we know the Bill will cause rents to increase. The fact the Minister has not challenged that assertion in any of his responses is telling. It will become too politically difficult for the Government to sustain a situation where rents are allowed to be reset to market rate and to increase by anything up to 15%. If we are not back here discussing this next year, we certainly will be back here before the local elections. Where will we be then? Will people be paying €3,000 a month in rent? In fact, on daft.ie right now, there is a two-bedroom apartment just around the corner from this building that is for rent for more than €3,000. What will happen as a result of this Bill is that if we get any new supply at all, it will largely comprise build-to-rent units that most ordinary working people cannot afford. There certainly will not be any supply in Limerick city, which I represent. Large institutional investors will not get enough of a yield from building expensive build-to-rent apartments there because there is no demand for them. The Minister talked about record investment but the outcomes of that investment are, by and large, incredibly poor. I am always astonished when I hear members of the Government talking about affordable housing provision, given that approximately 35% of what is counted as affordable housing actually comes from vacant property refurbishment grants. The Minister has not addressed my simple question as to what the forecasted impact of this Bill will be on rents in the private rental market for the rest of 2026, for 2027 and for 2028. The fact he is pushing this legislation through without being able to answer that question is frightening. I agree with him about the need for increased supply and for private sector investment, but this Bill will not deliver anywhere near the level of private sector investment needed to meet housing need, particularly in areas outside Dublin and very niche parts of Cork. The reality is that for every year since 2021, the Government has been 2,000 units or more below its completion targets. It will fail again this year to meet the target. The Minister referred to the crisis in the rental market and the homelessness crisis. I always think of the key recommendation of the Housing Commission that social and affordable housing should make up 20% of all housing stock. At present, that proportion is around 10%. The fact the Government has not met the targets it has set itself since Housing for All was introduced in 2021 really highlights that it is looking in the wrong place for a solution to the problem. This Bill will not improve the situation. It certainly will not arrest rising rents or rising homelessness. The Minister should lay before the House a report setting out exactly the modelling for the Bill. We have all gone through the RTB figures and done the calculations. The evidence, as it has been laid out by me and by other speakers, is absolutely frightening. These measures will devastate renters, who are the most vulnerable people in the housing system at the moment.

Sentiment score: -0.06

With regard to my amendment in particular and my request for an impact forecast on amendment No. 8, if the Minister is so certain that this is a permanent solution, which I do not believe it is, where is the modelling to forecast what it is going to do to rents in the private rental market over the next number of years?

Sentiment score: 0.18

Into RPZs.

Sentiment score: 0.00

I move amendment No. 7: In page 6, between lines 13 and 14, to insert the following: “Review of Act 3. The Minister shall, not later than 2 years after the passing of this Act, conduct a review of the operation and effectiveness of amendments effected by this Act and shall, not later than 3 months after the end of that period of 2 years, or on the completion of the review, whichever is the earlier, make a report, in writing, to each House of the Oireachtas of the findings of the review and of the conclusions drawn from those findings.”.

Sentiment score: -0.10

I move amendment No. 8: In page 6, between lines 13 and 14, to insert the following: “Impact forecast 3. The Minister shall, as soon as may be after the passing of this Act, but not later than 6 months thereafter, prepare and publish, including publication by electronic means, a statement of forecasts for the following period of 10 years following its publication in respect of the impact of the amendments effected by this Act on market rents for a representative sample of tenancies, together with such other information as the Minister may deem appropriate for the purposes of this section.”.

Sentiment score: 0.11

I move amendment No. 9: In page 6, between lines 13 and 14, to insert the following: “Notices of termination: temporary ban 3. Notwithstanding any other provision of this Act or any other enactment or rule of law, the period of 3 years commencing on the passing of this Act is deemed to be an emergency period within the meaning and for the purposes of section 5 of the Emergency Measures in the Public Interest (Covid-19) Act 2020 and that section, with the exception of subsection (6)(b), applies accordingly.”. This amendment introduces a new section to the Bill concerning a temporary ban on notices of termination. The section would, in effect, reintroduce the emergency period, which we remember from Covid-19. The emergency period was provided for by the Emergency Measures in the Public Interest (Covid-19) Act 2020. During that period, there was a statutory pause on all termination notices. We are in an emergency period now, as has been discussed at length. The Dáil has long since declared and recognised the housing crisis to be a national emergency. Under this section, there would be a similar ban, this time for three years from the passing of the Bill, on all termination notices and evictions.

Sentiment score: -0.41

If the Minister is not going to accept amendment No. 9, I plead with him to accept amendment No. 38. This amendment proposes to amend the table in section 34 of the 2004 Act, which sets out the ground for the termination of a tenancy. The ground specified in paragraph four of the table is that "the landlord requires the dwelling or the property containing the dwelling for his or her own occupation or for occupation by a member of his or her family". In my view and in the opinion of many people, this provision is much abused. This amendment proposes a balancing exercise that use for a family member should not be a ground for evicting a tenant if the tenant would be placed at risk of homelessness. Politics is about choices. The choice the Minister is making is going to increase homelessness. That is a fact. It is going to put rents up. In relation to my other amendment, there was 35% surge in evictions after the moratorium was lifted. I am not arguing for a permanent eviction moratorium. I am arguing for a moratorium to give us some breathing space. We will not get to it, but this is in a similar vein to why I tabled an amendment in relation to a rent break if rents exceeded 15% within a three-year period. When the eviction moratorium was in place, family homelessness fell by 39%. Like every Deputy and I am sure the Minister included, my constituency clinics are inundated with notices to quit. At this stage, I have over 100 notices to quit on the books in my office. I do not know what to tell people because in many cases they are being forced to leave their homes and if they are lucky, they will get emergency accommodation. Emergency accommodation in Limerick is often at capacity. On Monday, a man attended my clinic wondering how he would explain to his autistic child that the family were going to be made imminently homeless. Things have gotten so bad at this stage that all I am looking for with the first amendment is a breathing space and with the second amendment, to tighten up that provision to ensure that people are not being evicted on spurious grounds.

Sentiment score: -0.12

I want to come back in on that. Numerous cases were upheld by the RTB where it was found that this provision was abused with people being evicted from their property. What I am trying to do in this amendment is simply to tighten it up where there is a specific risk to the tenant being made homeless. That is all.

Sentiment score: -0.18