I will speak in support of this group of amendments, amendments Nos. 2, 7 and 8. I will explain the detailed reasons for that in a moment. I will start, however, with two small pieces of housekeeping. First, I acknowledge the very helpful role of the departmental officials. They have obviously been working on this Bill in a relatively short period of time and at any stage when either we or our committee sought additional information they have been very obliging in making sure we were facilitated in trying to understand the legislation. I wish to make clear that the criticisms I am going to make of this legislation are political criticisms directed at the Minister and the Government and not at the hard-working officials who are often put in very difficult positions producing complex legislation in short periods of time. This is a truly appalling way to make legislation. One can always tell when a government is embarrassed by its own proposals. One can always tell when a government is anxious that the public who are affected by its legislation get as little opportunity as possible to hear about those changes until it is too late by government rushing through legislation in impossibly short periods of time. The Bill before us is not simple. It is not straightforward, as we will discuss throughout the evening, and it is going to profoundly impact the lives of tens of thousands of people. Yet, we are being given an entirely inadequate Committee Stage opportunity. In effect, there will be no Report and Final Stages. The Government is going to make the most substantial change to the regulation of the private rental sector in over a decade in the space of ten hours when includes the time spent on the Bill last week and this week and whatever time it will get in the Seanad next week. Of course, the problem with that is not only is there a lack of scrutiny and a lack of media and public attention, it also means that whatever the Government's intentions, the negative consequences of the legislation are probably going to be even worse. Again, there are some specific instances in which I will raise that. I put on record my strong objection to how the Minister has proceeded with this. If this becomes the way in which he does his business, it will make the job of those of us on the Oireachtas housing committee who take our jobs as legislators seriously much more difficult. Specifically, with respect to the amendments requiring the Minister to bring forward a number of reports, there is a continuity between the three amendments because they all call for reports related to affordability of rents now but also affordability as a consequence of the changes the Government is making. I have tabled a number of amendments that are similar to amendment No. 1 in particular, to which Deputy Boyd Barrett referred earlier, to try to delay the passage of the Bill until such reports were produced. They have been ruled out of order and I fully accept the decision of the Ceann Comhairle but they are similar in intention to these amendments. For me, one of the really shocking things when we dealt with the legislation at pre-legislative scrutiny is that when we inquired as to whether there had been any attempt by the Department to make an assessment of the impact of the provisions of this Bill on the rents that renters pay, the answer was "No". That is an astounding omission on behalf of Government and here is the reason for that. At the very centre of this Bill, the most significant and controversial aspect is the market reset provision that will, from 1 March this year, allow a landlord to reset the market rent when a new tenant moves in. If the previous tenant left voluntarily or as a result of breach of contract, that market reset will start at the beginning of that tenancy and for all categories of tenant it will be repeated every six years. One would have thought, given the significance of that change, the Department might want to know the answer to two questions. First, how many people is that likely to impact in the first month, six months, 12 months, etc. The second question one would have thought a Minister who is interested in the impact of his legislation on renters would ask is how much extra they are going to pay. They are pretty reasonable questions which these amendments are putting to the Minister, albeit in retrospect because that is all we can do. Thankfully, even though the Minister did not think this was important information to have before bringing such radical proposals to Cabinet, the Residential Tenancies Board publishes the data that anybody with a little bit of time and a spreadsheet can understand. I would like to put on the record of the House the answers to those questions which these amendments are seeking the Minister to provide, which the Minister should have assessed and provided for himself, his Government colleagues and our committee prior to the passage of the legislation, but it is important that we hear it today. Question one is how many tenants, people or households is the market reset likely to impact month on month from March? Thankfully, the Residential Tenancies Board, over the last two and a half years, produced quarterly data looking at renewed tenancies and new tenancies. We start to get a picture of quarter on quarter, how many new first-time tenancies are created. The dataset is over two and a half years, so it gives us a good picture of what the trends are. The straight answer is, on average, every quarter, 25% or more of registered tenancies are new first-time tenancies. That equates in the last four quarters to over 60,000 new tenancies. Some are single people, some are couples and some are families with children. That means, if those trends continue, the potential number of new first-time tenants impacted by the market reset is somewhere in the region of 60,000 if trends continue. That proposition is supported by the Residential Tenancies Board's other important piece of information that the average length of a tenancy is about three and a half years. The first thing to say is that we are looking at, from March through to the end of this year and into next year, tens of thousands renters whom the Minister and his Minister of State, and my colleague, Deputy McGrath from the housing committee, are going to expose to the market reset. That is an indisputable fact. Sure, the changes may result in some changes in patterns and levels of churn, but it is likely they will be minimal. That means huge numbers of people will be impacted by this month on month from March. It leads us to the next question directly related to the three amendments before us. What is that likely to cost? How much extra rent are Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Lowry and Healy-Rae Independents allowing landlords to charge from that market reset? I appreciate this is going to be uncomfortable listening for some folks on the other side of the Chamber but it is important that we have it on the record. In order to determine or try to work out what the likely cost is, we also have really helpful data from the Residential Tenancies Board every single quarter. Over the last two and a half years, it tells us, Statewide, regionally and in every county, including the Ceann Comhairle's, the Minister's and mine, what rents are being charged on average for existing renters and what the new rents are. That means, on a spreadsheet, you can set out rents for existing renters, rents for new renters, look at the difference and that will give you a pretty reasonable estimation of the potential increased rent from the market reset. In fact, that data is from quarter 2 of 2025, which means the scale of the uplift is likely to be much greater. What is the answer to the question? Based on the RTB's overall data, anybody hit with the market reset from March is likely to be paying at a minimum 17% more rent than they would have otherwise. That is a significant amount of money. That averages to about €3,000 of additional rent in a year. What the Minister is asking us to vote for is for those people who start new tenancies from March of this year to be paying at a minimum €3,000 more a year. When you start to look at the county breakdowns, this is where it starts to get really interesting. The county-by-county and city breakdowns are utterly staggering. Limerick City, the Minister of State's constituency, will have one of the potentially highest market reset rates in the State at roughly €4,000. What the Minister of State is going to vote for tonight is that renters in his constituency, if they start a new tenancy from the beginning of March, could, over the next 12 months, on the basis of the RTB figures, face €4,000 a year more than under the current regime. I appreciate that might come as a surprise or shock to the Minister of State, but is it not utterly bizarre that an Opposition Member using RTB figures has to stand on this side of the Chamber five or six months after this was proposed and it may be the first time he is being told the actual impact on the people he claims to represent? Waterford City is in a similar region as well. Let us look at Wexford, a Cheann Comhairle, because it is important we all know the impact of this. I know she is neutral and not involved in this, but the uplift is 21% higher rent than they would otherwise be paying as a consequence of this Bill. That is an extra €2,532 a year. I am sure when she is out in her constituency she will be told it is huge sum of money for a young couple trying to rent to save for a home or for a modest income working person to pay. What about Wicklow? Wicklow will be €4,000. Leitrim will be €3,000. The single biggest uplift, the city that is going to expose renters to the greatest level of additional rent over 12 months, is Galway city at €5,000. Before we have a conversation, and we will have that conversation today, about supply or tenure - because in both of those, the Minister's arguments are very questionable - the facts, as evidenced by the Residential Tenancies Board in its registration and rent data, is that if this Bill goes through tonight, into the Seanad tomorrow and passed next week, new renters in new tenancies will be facing potential rent increases in the order of 20%, 25% or 30% more - €2,000, €3,000, €4,000 or, in the case of Galway, €5,000. The Minister has to ask himself what he has against renters. Does he really think renters have that kind of money to pay that extra? We know with data from the ESRI that renters, typically speaking - not exclusively, but typically speaking - have lower incomes. These are the people least able to pay the additional charges. We also know that students, the overwhelming majority of whom do not live in the student-specific accommodation sector but rather live in the private rental sector, typically speaking on nine-month leases not 12 months, come September, are going to get hit substantially again and again. That means, for example, families from the western seaboard, from Donegal, the north west, etc., who do not have significant university places close to them, are going to be hit by phenomenally greater rent increases. We will talk about the mess the Government is making of the student-specific sector later. The summary is as follows. I have been saying this all week, and it is really interesting because nobody in the Government has responded to this. The summary consequence of this proposal, which these amendments are trying to get to the bottom of, is that somewhere in the region of 60,000 households - singles, couples, families - over the next 12 months, will be asked by Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Lowry and Healy-Rae Independents to pay rent increases in the order of €3,000, €4,000 or €5,000. When you strip it all away, that is what is in front of us. That is why I think these amendments are enormously important. They are asking the Minister to do something he should have done and should have published previously. You might ask why are you so intent on imposing so much hardship on these renters. The Minister has given us the answer. I am sure he will repeat it again today. He will say the only way we can tackle the housing crisis is if we increase supply. The primary approach to increasing supply from this Government is to incentivise large institutional investors from the global markets to come to Ireland and build high-density apartment schemes because, as supply goes up, then, over time, rents will moderate. What utter rubbish. The reason we know it is rubbish is because there is no analysis anywhere, either produced by the Department or anyone else, that tells us that if you increase institutional investment to the high end of the market, high density and high price, it will have any impact on price other than perpetually increasing rent. It is economic absurdity, yet the Minister repeats it as if it is some kind of empirical fact. If he really believes it, he should publish the evidence. Get a bunch of housing and economic experts to produce a report and put it on the table. In fact, the way the Government is designing this means that not only will new tenants in existing rental stock be hit with a market reset, in most cases, at the start and near the end, but for new apartment stock, that will not even be constrained by the rent pressure zones in between. It will be the CPI. It will be the most aggressive form of inflation possible. If I were an institutional investor - thankfully, I am not - the Government is guaranteeing me perpetually increasing rents irrespective of what happens for new and sitting tenants, which is something it is also permitting for new student-specific accommodation. Locked into its formula here is an incentive for those investors to continue to increase rents. As we know, because there continues to be an exit of small, semi-professional accidental landlords from the market, for a range of reasons, some of which is dissatisfaction with Government policy, the lower end and lower priced private rental stock will continue to deplete. The only new stock, if we get any significant increase at all, will be high end, high density and high cost. Investors will not be building anything in the Minister's constituency or anything in Limerick. They might build something in the docklands of Cork, in the constituency of the Minister of State, Deputy McGrath, but I do not think the hard-working constituents he well-represents at our committee when we talk about affordable homes think that €3,000 a month is affordable for a standard 70 sq. m one-bedroom in the centre of Cork. I do not think anybody elected him or me to advocate for that, but that is what he is voting for here tonight. This will not increase supply in the places it is needed. Where it does increase supply, it will be exceptionally expensive. Meanwhile, the lower cost rental, along with the under-provision of social and affordable and private for-purchase homes, will dissipate. I will make a final point on these amendments. Every time I am in a debate on these matters with somebody from the Government, the last thing they want to talk about are rents because God forbid we talk about the centrepiece of the legislation. Instead, what the Government keeps talking about is that it is giving people real security of tenure and new shiny six-year tenancies where they cannot be evicted. First, under Part 4 of the Residential Tenancies Act, we already have six-year tenancies. They used to be for four years and are now for six; they already exist. Second, existing tenants who remain in their current properties, and Deputy Hearne made this point on Second Stage, get no benefit. New tenants of small landlords can still be evicted during that six-year period. There is a bit of a restriction, but there are still three significant grounds upon which notice of termination can be provided. For large landlords, the Government is finally putting on the Statute Book what already exists in practice, which is institutional investors only evicting for breach of contract. The problem is, and this relates directly back to these amendments, what value is security of tenure if people cannot afford the rent? It is almost as if the Minister has forgotten why rent pressure zones were introduced in the first place. I was never a supporter of rent pressure zones. I sat up there and argued tooth and nail that Simon Coveney was getting it wrong and tabled amendments that the Government would not accept. Much of our criticisms of the rent pressure zones - many of us voted against them in the end - came to pass. They provided modest protection for some but you could not have made a bigger hames of rent regulation than Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil at the time. The reason rent pressure zones were introduced was that from 2014 to 2016 a new phenomenon had entered our housing system: child and family homelessness. That is something that in 2011 was virtually unheard of but because of double-digit rising rents the number of families and children entering emergency accommodation rose for one reason and one reason only; an inability to pay a legally sanctioned rent increase from the Government, which forced them into homelessness. It was double-digit rental inflation. Rent pressure zones put some level of pause on that, but what the Government is proposing here is to go back to double-digit rental inflation. Deputy Boyd Barrett made a point that has to be emphasised over and over again. Last year, about 20,000 eviction notices or notices of termination were issued. Many of the people who got those notices were waiting incredibly long periods for social housing. Their rent was subsidised by the housing assistance payment, HAP. Today, the gap between HAP and new rents is already too great for the vast majority of those people. If another €3,000, €4,000 or €5,000 is added on to those new rents, it is game over. Why would the Minister, a year into his job, when child and family homelessness is rising, introduce a policy that every single policy expert, front-line homeless service provider and anybody who can count is telling him will increase and accelerate the rate at which families with children will be in homelessness? We will all stand here, month after month, and remind the Government that it took this decision. It took a decision to allow market rents to increase to double digits. As a consequence of that, people who desperately need private rental cannot get it and are pushed into homelessness. The Minister will accuse me of personalising it when I do this at some later stage, but that means he is directly responsible, by the actions and legislation he is promoting, securing Cabinet approval for and getting the approval of backbenchers, for all of that. It will push up rents and will not increase supply to any significant level. Where it does result in increased supply, it will be expensive and inappropriate and will lead to increased levels of homelessness. The Government is introducing a security of tenure regime that is so complex it will be very difficult to explain, even harder to understand and virtually impossible to enforce. I have been here for a decade and I have seen some pretty politically shabby pieces of rent reform in terms of what the Government asked officials to do. This is by far the worst in a decade. This is what the Minister will be remembered for. The legacy he is going to leave is higher and ever-increasing rents, far greater financial pressure on renters, rising levels of homelessness and a security of tenure regime, which I will put money on today we will be back here about in two, three or four years' time. Whoever replaces the Minister for the mess he will have left will be trying to undo and unpick this, just as we stood here with Simon Coveney in 2016 and pleaded with him to do it properly, do it right, listen to the experts and to those people who know better. He ignored us, Eoghan Murphy ignored us, Darragh O'Brien ignored us and now the Minister is ignoring us. The consequence will be more housing failure. There are eminently sensible amendments. I am happy to support them. I am very interested in hearing the Minister's response to what I have said and I will continue the debate. Without doubt, this will be remembered as one of the worst interventions in the private rental market in recent history and it will be the name of the Minister, Deputy James Browne, that will be associated with it.
Sentiment score: 0.05
Sometimes, what the Minister does not say is more revealing than what he does say. I stated earlier that on the basis of data from the Residential Tenancies Board, within 12 months of the enactment of this Bill, anywhere in the region of 60,000 households will be impacted by the market reset. The Minister has not challenged that. In any of the radio or TV debates I have taken part in, nobody has challenged it. This means that the Minister is accepting the RTB's data that over the next 12 months at least 60,000 households - single people, families and children - will be impacted by his decision. The other interesting thing that the Minister did not respond to is the analysis of the Residential Tenancies Board's data actually detailing the increase in rent for those households in the coming months. It will mean an average of an extra €3,000 a month. In the Minister's constituency, it will be a little lower, at €2,500 a year. The Minister of State, Deputy O'Sullivan has joined us. In his country of Cork, what he will be voting in favour of this evening, based on the data from the Residential Tenancies Board-----
Sentiment score: 0.12
I know it might be difficult to hear the real-world financial consequences of what he will be voting for, but in Cork, the extra rent that will be imposed on new tenancies from 1 March in a year will be €3,100 across the city and county. In the city specifically, it will be almost €4,000. I will ask the Minister a very simple question. How is increasing rents in every county in the State going to contribute to increasing the kind of supply needed in every county? Is the Minister of State seriously suggesting that incentivising private institutional investors with record rents will lead to the delivery of apartments to meet the needs of his constituents in County Cork? Of course it will not.
Sentiment score: -0.08
The Minister of State knows that the only investors who are interested in these kinds of rents are those - the Minister of State was not here earlier so I will repeat it for his benefit - who might invest in the docklands area of Cork and in very high-end, high-cost parts of Dublin. The Minister and the Minister of State are going to ask their constituents to pay somewhere in the region of an extra €3,000 per year for new tenancies. The Minister had an opportunity to dispute the RTB data and he chose not to. If he wants to dispute it, I will be more than interested in hearing his analysis. The Minister and the Minister of State are going to ask new renters in their constituencies to be pay additional rent of in the region of €3,000 per year in the absence of extra supply in those constituencies. The very particular category of institutional investors that the Minister is talking about are not coming to County Cork or County Wexford anytime soon. I want to rebut the Minister's assertion. We are here dealing with his legislation. If he wants to have a debate about our solutions, that is fine. We will do it any day he likes, but I will deal with some of them now. This is the Committee Stage debate on the Government's legislation and impact it is going to have on real people in real time in the months ahead. The Minister keeps saying that this rent hike Bill, coupled with the reduction in apartment design standards and the massive tax break for apartment builders is going to lead to a dramatic increase in supply. I have not heard anybody in the industry say that. It will increase some level of supply in certain parts of Dublin and Cork but nowhere else. The cost of that supply is going to be so expensive that the working people many of us represent will not be able to afford it. We need to increase supply and we need to increase social supply. The Government keeps trotting out the line about building more social homes than at any time since the 1970s. In the 1970s, the population of the country was half what it is now. Our social housing waiting lists were a fraction of what they are today. If we make an honest assessment between the position now and that which obtained in the 1970s, we can see that we are delivering less than half of what was delivered then per capita and even less in proportion to need. This is despite the fact that this State has more money than ever before and a capacity to deliver. The Minister also accused us of protecting existing renters. Some 20,000 existing renters get notices of termination every year. These people are now going to have to find other rental accommodation. As a consequence, they will have to pay additional rent. What is happening simply makes no sense. A claim has been made to the effect that security of tenure is being introduced for the first time. Darragh O'Brien came in here in 2023 and said he was introducing tenancies of indefinite duration. He misled this House, because they were not indefinite. Likewise, the Minister is not for the first time introducing security of tenure. The Residential Tenancies Act 2004 involved an element of security of tenure, but there were so many loopholes that many tenants were left behind. Darragh O'Brien's tenancies of indefinite duration had so many loopholes that the same thing happened. Let us look at the Minister's proposals here. New tenants in properties owned by small landlords can still be evicted if the landlord or a spouse needs the property. They can still be evicted on the grounds of financial hardship, ill-defined as it is, or in the context of the need to discharge a debt. Here is the really important one that the Minister did not mention. They can be evicted if they cannot afford the rent. That ground remains in place. If somebody enters into a tenancy at the new market rent and is then hit with 2% or CPI each year, whichever the lowest, and if at any point in the following five years or six years they fall into rent arrears, they will be evicted. The Minister of State is smirking at that remark. Maybe he was not here in this House, when in 2014, 2015 and 2016 huge numbers of families were evicted from their homes because they could not afford double-digit rent increases. That was the reality. That is what drove family homelessness right across this State in those years. If the Minister of State thinks that is funny or something to smirk about, that is okay-----
Sentiment score: 0.07
-----but what the Government is proposing and what it is going to------
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The Minister of State was smirking.
Sentiment score: 0.00
I am quite happy to engage. If this was a proper Committee Stage debate, we would be able to have these types of engagements. That is one of the things we have been denied. Let us be very clear. Double-digit rental inflation leaves renters unable to pay their rent. They get into rent arrears, they get a notice of termination for non-payment of rent and they get evicted. That is what happens. What is the Government proposing for new renters in County Carlow? Potential rent increases in the first year of 29%. For County Cavan, it is 29%. For County Clare, it is 26.9%. For Cork, including the county, it is 25%. The figure for the city is 20%. It goes on and on. In the context of the market reset, not a single county or city will have a rent increase in the first year of less than 17% or 18%. For some, it will be as high as 35%. That is what the Government is proposing. If the Minister is right and this leads to an increase in supply at some point - let us imagine that thesis is correct - who made him to think that it is acceptable for renters to have to pay the extortionate rents necessary to bring about that increase? It beggars belief that the Minister cannot be at least honest and say in order to attract the very specific kind of institutional investment that the Government believes is necessary, it is going to have to have ever greater rip-off rents which, like existing rents, people simply cannot afford. I will come to the alternative and to private sector investment in a moment The Minister also likes to say that people on this side of this House have nothing to say about private sector investment. In fact, I have probably spent more time talking about alternative and better forms of private sector investment than the Minister. The missing piece of our private sector housing crisis is not high-end, high-density, high-cost private rental. That is not our problem. The missing part is a failure on the part of the Government to support and activate the small and medium-sized builder-developer sector to build significantly more good-quality private homes at more moderated prices in every county in the State. The Government could deal with that by fixing the problems facing the sector. Action in that regard is entirely absent. The Minister repeated a line used by the Taoiseach to the effect that the 240,000 tenancies currently in place will not be impacted. What the Government completely ignores in this regard is the RTB data I quoted at the outset to the effect that for every quarter for the past two and half years, 25% of all registered tenancies have been new first-time tenancies. The private rental sector is in a state of constant churn for a variety of reasons. If those trends continue, within four years, almost all tenants in the private rental sector will be captured by the market reset. Ultimately, some will not be captured until year six, but that is what the Government is proposing. It has been stated that the greatest driver of homeless is the crisis in the private rental sector. In fact, that is not strictly true. The greatest driver of homelessness is the failure of the State over the past number of decades, including under this Government, to deliver a volume of social homes to meet the needs of people who need social housing. The lack of such homes forces people into the private rental sector for extended periods. When they eventually become homeless, they remain in emergency accommodation for far too long. Again, this is because of the Government's failure to provide adequate social housing. There are plenty of solutions on this side of this House. However, what the Minister has ignored and has tacitly accepted is that tens of thousands of renters in new tenancies from the start of March are going to be hit with rent increases of the order of €3,000 to €5,000 annually. That is what the data from the Residential Tenancies Board indicates. I would happily give the Minister an hour of my speaking time because I would love him to outline the analysis of this that allows him to shake his head. His officials told us that they were not asked to produce any analysis to underpin this Bill. The Housing Agency was not asked to produce any analysis to underpin this Bill either. None of the academic experts in our universities who specialise in the private rental sector were asked to carry out an analysis. Unless the Minister has an analysis that he has been hiding from us all, then either the RTB data is correct and he must accept it and live by it or he has to produce something else. We are going to go through other aspects of the Bill as we proceed. I would have thought that the Minister would at least have been honest enough to say that the primary purpose of the Bill is to allow rents to rise. That the Government has made a calculated assessment in order to attract a certain category of institutional investment, that those involved want rental yields even greater than what the new private sector stock is getting now and that the Government has said "That is no problem. Off you go." The Minister is right that there was an increase in the number of apartment completions last year. Almost all of those apartments were bought by the State. Virtually no new private sector investment acquired any of them. Therefore, the idea that somehow the completion figures, including those relating to apartments, for the end of last year are in any way is a justification for what is happening is simply unbelievable. I am going to make a wager. In six months, let us come back and have a debate on the impact of this Bill. In 12 months, if the Minister is still in office, he should come back in here and we will have a debate. Schedule such a debate and allocate Government time.
Sentiment score: 0.06
I invite the Minister to come back in here and prove that we were wrong and that he was right. If the Minister has the courage of his convictions and if he had a credible analysis of the Bill, which he does not, he would agree to that without doubt. We cannot even get the Minister into a television studio to debate with us on any of these matters, so I doubt that he would be willing to give the time for a debate here. As the month-on-month and quarter-on-quarter figures come in, we are going to see the consequences of the Government's policy. How do we know that? We know because we have been here before. Deputy Boyd Barrett is the longest serving TD dealing with housing on the Opposition benches. I am not far behind him. Simon Coveney made all the same promises.
Sentiment score: 0.00
Eoghan Murphy made all the same promises. It is almost like Groundhog Day. What happened? Homelessness, rents and house prices rose, and the right kind of supply never materialised. The Minister's party colleague Darragh O'Brien probably made more promises than anybody else. It was a case of "Darragh gets it done", as Oliver Callan used to say in his sketches. What happened? The Minister of State, Deputy O'Sullivan, might tell us what happened while Darragh O'Brien was Minister.
Sentiment score: 0.17
I will tell him what happened. Homelessness rose. I know it is funny. I know the Minister of State thinks it is hilarious. As a consequence of the policies of the Minister of State's party, real people ended up in emergency accommodation who should never have ended up there. That is the consequences of what you guys do, and you are doing it again. You are doing it in a far more serious manner than you have done in a decade. That is why none of us on this side of the House will make any apologies for highlighting the real-world impacts on real people of the Government's legislation. The Government can try to distract all it wants when it comes to social media clips in a way that makes it seem as if nobody on the Government benches uses social media. The Minister seems to be getting a little better at it. Social media clips do not hide rising homelessness numbers. They do not hide rising rents. They do not hide a Government that continues to miss almost all of its targets. I look forward to debating the social and affordable housing output figures for 2025 when they are eventually released. I suspect the targets in that regard will have been missed as well. This is terrible legislation. It is going to have profoundly negative impacts on tens of thousands of people. The fact that the Minister cannot even acknowledge that or respond to the factual information we have put to him shows that despite my very generous colleague's assertion to the contrary, the Minister has not made any mistake at all. He is doing this deliberately. He is doing it knowingly. While he might be hiding from the evidence, he is doing this because he has chosen to do it in full knowledge of the consequences and the cost. Shame on both the Minister and Minister of State for doing this.
Sentiment score: -0.06
The reason this is more like a Second Stage debate is because the Government forced us to have the Committee and Remaining Stages on the floor on the Dáil instead of us having Committee Stage as normal in a committee room where we would have had a completely different type of engagement as we always do. That was an imposition by the Government. We all wanted and argued at the Business Committee that the Committee Stage should be taken in the normal manner. For the Minister, after the Government deliberately decided that this would be the format for Committee Stage, then to criticise that format is very not credible. I am going to respond specifically to the Minister's issues because, in fact, almost everything I have said during the debate is about the amendments. He accused me of using RTB data to scaremonger. In fact, my assessment of the RTB data is a very modest one. It asks a very simple question. The Government is introducing a change of policy. That change of policy will allow a landlord to reset the rent to market rent between tenancies. It is eminently reasonable to ask: how much will that reset be? The data that allow us to answer that question is from the RTB, which tells us what the current rent is and what the new market rent is in a certain location for a certain type of property. They are the facts. For the Minister to describe the facts as scaremongering when at no stage in the past six months has he put any alternative assessment into place just shows that we are correct. He also said that the assessment that the RTB's trends on registrations continue into the future is based on a no-change basis. That is not strictly correct. I said that if these trends continue, but what is it that leads to new tenancies being created? It is not rent pressure zones, that is for sure. It is that some people in the private rental sector move out because they get social housing; it is nowhere near enough, but some. Some people move out of the private rental sector because they manage to buy a house. Other people move out of the private rental sector because they cannot afford the rent and, because of the Government's policies, they are forced to move back in with family and friends. Some people also emigrate. That frees up rental stock that other people then rent and that is going to continue. Is the Minister asking me: do I think the trends are going to continue exactly as they are? No, I do not, but all of those elements are going to create a situation where new rental stock will become available that will be covered by the market reset rule and tenants will be affected in their tens of thousands. I spoke with a large institutional landlord last year. This is a landlord that does not evict on sale. This is a landlord that does not evict on family member grounds. This is a landlord that will only move to evict if the tenant breaches contract. It is one of the largest institutional landlords in the State. What does the Minister think its rental turnover is every year? What does he think its rental turnover is in terms of the churn within their tenancies? Has he ever stopped to ask any of the large institutional investors that effectively currently operate a policy of no-fault evictions what their churn is? In the case of this significant player in the market, its turnover is about 25% of tenancies annually. It is remarkably similar to the RTB's data. This is a landlord currently operating a no-fault eviction policy and it still has a 25% turnover every year. That is one of the reasons what company through its lobbyist, Irish Institutional Property, lobbied for this. They know that once this is through, all of their rents will reset to market rent every four years. I suspect that the Minister knows that. I suspect from the conversations he has had that he is fully aware of it. The information that we put into the public domain this week and put on the Dáil record in more detail about new tenancy registration trends and the cost of the market reset is factual. Of course, whether those things transpire for every individual renter in the time ahead is a separate question but we will have plenty of data to deal with that. The Minister said that we are moving from a temporary situation to a permanent one. That temporary situation lasted a decade, and it is because the Government made such a mess of the rent pressure zone legislation. Just as RPZs were permanent for a decade, there is going to be further changes to this legislation because of the mess the Government is making of it. With respect to security of tenure, under section 8, there are still significant grounds for eviction for new tenants of small landlords. Are they the same as under section 34 of the current Residential Tenancies Act? They are not. They are slightly more restricted, but the landlord will still be able to evict where the dwelling is needed by him or her or a more narrowly defined family member group than before to avoid undue hardship, but also in cases where the landlord has a debt discharge. There is an interesting question that I want the Minister to answer. What is status of an eviction at the end of an existing Part 4 tenancy for a tenant who has an existing Part 4 tenancy prior to June or July 2022? As he knows, those tenancies will come to the end of their first cycle in 2027 or 2028 when the landlord can issue a notice of termination on no grounds and strictly speaking under law that would not be seen as a no-fault eviction. Are those tenants protected under the Government's new rules? In terms of the landlord resetting the rent for the next tenant to market rent at the beginning, will the landlord be able to avail of that? The interesting thing about the eviction levels at the end of existing Part 4 tenancies is that when the no grounds rule was available, it was hardly ever used. Will we see a glut of landlords availing of that come 2028? Again, the legislation does not speak to it, but I am interested in the Minister's view. It also ignores the fact that someone can be evicted if they cannot afford the rent because of the rate at which it is rising and fall into arrears. That is an experience that far too many families who ended up in homelessness lived with in 2014, 2015 and 2016. No-fault evictions are not being ended for all new tenancies. The Minister is correct that they are for the tenants of larger landlords, although for many of those tenants that is currently the default position anyway, but for tenants in new tenancies of small landlords, which is currently about 44% of the market, there will still be grounds for no-fault evictions, albeit they will be slightly more restricted than before. I am not going to continue this discussion, but I would be interested to hear the Minister's view on whether a landlord who avails of that termination at the end of an existing Part 4 tenancy, pre-2022 will be able to avail of the market reset at the start of a new tenancy on foot of that eviction.
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Except for breach of contract.
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Except for breach of contract.
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It is just a clarification, I am not heckling. Except for breach of contract.
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Surely breach of contract is also-----
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