This Bill should be called the raise the rent Bill. The purpose of the Bill is to raise people's rents. That is literally it. The Government likes to pretend that there is some greater, deeper meaning going on. It likes to talk about security of tenure but the purpose of this Bill is to raise people's rents. People's rents have already almost doubled in the past ten years but the Government thinks that for the people it represents - the big landlords, the so-called institutional investors - the rents are not rising fast enough so it is going to introduce this Bill to raise the rents even faster to cost the average renter more than €3,000 extra a year. That is the purpose of this Bill and it will be the consequence of this Bill. The Government is going to ram this Bill through. It will guillotine it and shut down the debate in this House tonight and the consequences are that people's rents are going to rise. What does that look like? It is a massive further transfer of wealth from some of the poorest people in the country to some of the richest people and richest corporations in the country, which are already making plenty of money from their very many rental properties. That is one impact. Another impact is that evictions are going to soar and not from a low point but from a high point. Evictions are already at the same level proportionately as they were in the 1850s in Ireland. Do we know what came after that number of evictions in Ireland in the 1850s? What came after that was the Land War because people simply had enough and I think that is going to come now for the Government as well. People may say that this does not make any sense. The Government has not presented any evidence to show what is going to happen and how this is magically going to translate into supply. All the experts are saying this is not working. The Government talks day in, day out about listening to hard-working people and trying to look out for renters, so why on earth is it bringing in a Bill that is going to rapidly increase people's rents? The answer is very simple. If it walks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, it is probably a duck. It is a landlords' Government. That is the bottom-line truth of it. We have a Government that is interested in representing the views and the material interests of big landlords. About one third of Government Deputies are landlords but the rest of them represent them very effectively in any case because ideologically they are committed to this idea that the market has to solve things and trickle-down economics. The Government for the past ten years has been implementing all the policies that are supposedly great and will resolve the housing crisis but that have resulted in the housing crisis getting worse, but by a happy coincidence, there is a big transfer of wealth from the public, through the State and taxpayers' money, to landlords and from renters to landlords. That is the essence of it. We have a landlords' Government that represents the interests of the tiny minority that are landlords and the even smaller minority that are big landlords in this country as opposed to all of those who are affected by the housing crisis. The fundamental point is that the Government does not represent those who suffer from the housing crisis but those who profit from the housing crisis. Why does the Government keep introducing policies that make the housing crisis worse? It is time to draw the conclusion that it does not care about ending the housing crisis. If the housing crisis ended, the Government's friends - the developers and the big landlords - would not be able to make the sort of money they are currently able to make. That is the fundamental point and it is why we need to get rid of this Government as soon as we can and build a movement on the streets and in communities to resist these rent increases and the evictions that are going to flow from it and to massively apply pressure on the Government on these issues. I want to raise a point about landlords in this Dáil. It is shocking that about 20% of TDs in the Dáil are going to vote tonight on legislation that is personally going to benefit them. If you are a landlord and you vote in the Dáil tonight to pass this legislation, you are going to personally benefit, on average, to the tune of about €3,000. It is shocking that it is allowed in the first place, and, whether they agree with it or not, that the TDs affected would not put their hands up and say that they are personally affected by this and recuse themselves from the vote. Even at this late stage, I appeal to landlord TDs not to participate in this vote tonight. It is utterly wrong that landlords, who will personally benefit from the increasing of rents, are going to get to vote on this legislation. They will personally benefit from it while it will have such a devastating effect on so many people. In general, we have a landlords' Government with plenty of landlord TDs, but it is a bit much that literally the landlords' lobbying organisation wrote amendments for TDs and the TDs literally copy and pasted them and submitted them. This is the democratic process. Independent Ireland's Gillian O'Toole literally got the same email that the rest of us got from the Irish Property Owners Association, IPOA, the landlords' lobby organisation, that asked us to put in these amendments on behalf of landlords. Independent Ireland said: "Yes, sir. We represent the landlords. We will submit the amendments." It is very blatant. Do not let anyone fall for the idea that Independent Ireland represents the common man or woman; it does no such thing. It explicitly represents the landlords. The landlord lobby group says that it wants these amendments and Independent Ireland says, "Yes, sure. We will put them in immediately." People should be aware of that. I want to raise a particular point about the impact of this in terms of HAP. The point has been made about the HAP levels. The other point in relation to that is many HAP tenants across the country will effectively have a double rent increase. Councils across the country are hiking council rents. Dublin City Council, for example, has voted to do so and is due to implement the hike from April. Galway City Council has done it and other councils across the country have done it too. It looks like South Dublin County is trying to go for significant increases. It is to be voted on towards the end of this year to come into effect next year. This is a nationwide process. It is being driven by council management, but it is also being driven by the Government. Reading the Government's latest housing plan, it explicitly talks about merging council rents and cost rental over time, in other words, doing away with the differential rent system and the basic and fair idea that the amount people pay for housing should be based on their income. It is bad enough that it is going to result in massive increases for council tenants, but HAP tenants are going to be doubly hit. HAP tenants are going to be faced with significant increases - let us say, 30% increases in what they are paying to the council - and then they are going to be hit by this increase which, if the HAP limits do not increase, all of which will be gobbled up in the top-ups that they are paying. They are the worst affected and they are some of the most vulnerable people in the housing market as a whole. The Opposition is mostly united in this House - the left Opposition, certainly - in opposing what the Government is doing here, but I call on all the left parties to take a stand on the councils against these council rent increases. Even if they have voted in some cases to allow these to go ahead, they should reconsider it, particularly in light of what is happening here and the extra pressure that it is going to apply in terms of HAP tenants. What our amendment seeks to do is show an image of how you could do things fundamentally differently. If you start from the point of view of not representing landlords but, instead, of representing the majority of people who are affected by the housing crisis, you would go about this in a very different way by establishing a board to reset rents to affordable levels and where the guideline for establishing affordability would be rents that are, in general, no more than 20% of a tenant's income. That is the alternative way to tackle the housing crisis. It says let us stop pouring public money into the pockets of private landlords and developers. Let us stop pouring and enabling more and more private renters' money to be funnelled into the hands of landlords. Instead, let us protect tenants. Let us ban economic evictions. Let us control rents and use public money to have a State construction company to build social and affordable homes. That is the sensible thing to do, if you were not governed by the class interest of representing landlords and the free market ideology that goes alongside that.

Sentiment score: 0.02

I will briefly respond to some of what the Minister said, though first I will note that we can see the impact of the guillotine. We are still on the first amendment and we are going to run out of debating time relatively soon. When the Minister made the point that the Government is not ramming it through, his excuse for how it is not ramming it through is because it announced the legislation last year, in August, but that is precisely the point. He announced the policy proposal last year, which is fine, and absolutely his right, but we are debating it, having voted on Second Stage just a few hours ago, and will do Committee and Remaining Stages in five hours. It will be guillotined three weeks out from this being implemented. That is ramming it through. There would be no ramming it through if the Minister had brought in the legislation in September or October, if we had debated it and so on. The Minister is absolutely ramming it through. That the Minister announced it a long time ago and did not bring forward the legislation so it could be scrutinised and amended precisely proves the point about him ramming it through rather than disproving it. It is interesting that the Minister admits that we currently have a situation of misery. He admits that but says that his Bill is a way to avoid making that misery permanent. I will take the first part of that first of all. We currently have a situation of misery for renters, for people who are trying to buy their homes, for homeless people, and for half a million young people trapped at home. A system of misery has been widely created in the housing system, affecting many people. How did we get here? Shall we have a look at how we got here? If the Government accepts that we have a situation of misery and the Opposition says we have a situation of misery, how did we get here? We got here with Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, but the key point in a way is not that those parties that are responsible for it, but that the policies pursued by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael got us to this point. I have been listening to the debate and the policies that were pursued have been set out in great detail. They involved a move away from the delivery of social housing at any scale. There has been an increase in recent years but there has almost been a complete collapse. The policy has been that the market will provide. It has involved incentivising landlords and developers to come into the market and making sure they can make as much profit as they need to make. That is the essence of the approach of the Government and what has got us to the point of housing misery. I always make the point that I remember in the 2016 general election campaign that homelessness and the housing crisis were emerging as a significant issue. By that stage, we had fewer than 5,000 people homeless. Later on, it was said that when we reached 10,000, that would be a breaking point and that people would not stand going over 10,000. In the 2020 general election, we were over 10,000. By the 2024 general election, we were well over 15,000, and now we are on a trajectory to 20,000, which will be met rapidly if the Government gets its way and manages to implement this approach. That is the consequence of those housing policies. One follows the other. Some people have got very rich in the meantime from that. It is a massive transfer of wealth from the many to the few. What is different about this Government, this housing policy and what is in the Bill? This is just supercharging the policies we have had up until now. It is going in the same direction that has got us to this point but just going faster. It is all this trickle-down idea that if we invite in these people and make it clear to them that they can make loads of money, and that if we give a windfall of €20 million to IRES REIT, it will invest more money because it thinks it will be able to make more profits, and then, in the long run, rents will come down. That is effectively what the Government says its position is: that there will be pain in the short term and rents will rise for people, but the investment will come in and in the long run we will have a better housing market. It is effectively what the Government has been doing for the last ten years, though not at the scale or speed of increases that the Government is now introducing. The result is the misery that the Minister admits has been created. The Minister's point about social media clips was ironic. The Government says things all the time for social media clips and it is pushed out, just to say it so many times that people think there must be something to it. The Minister said that the Opposition has not put forward any proposals or alternatives. I do not know how he can say it. He has been listening to us. He might not agree with what is being put forward but it is clear that the amendments, like our amendments, contain alternative proposals. He might not think the proposals will work but they are clearly alternatives. Alternative positions have been raised repeatedly in the course of the debate, calling for a ban on economic evictions, which we know works. We know it does not stop homelessness or people entering homelessness, but we know that it significantly slows it down. We know that because we have done it, and when we get rid of it, the speed of people entering homelessness goes up faster. We have said we want real rent controls which reduce rents to affordable levels and we have pointed to the need for State investment and a State construction company to build social and affordable homes. It is just not very serious for the Minister to say he has not heard any alternative proposals when we are literally debating amendments which have alternative proposals. The Government's approach on this issue is horrendously cynical. One part of it is to try to normalise the housing crisis and make it like the health crisis, which every opinion poll turns up as a significant issue. When asked what a big issue is for them, people say the health crisis. The Government has normalised the idea that it is such a big crisis and it is a black hole which money can be thrown at, but it can never really be resolved, to try to neuter it as a political issue. Successive Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael Governments have done that reasonably effectively on the issue of the health crisis. Effectively the Government's approach to the housing crisis is to do the same. It is to get people to accept as normal that we will hit 20,000 people in emergency accommodation and that we will go beyond that, and to accept that rents will increase even faster, to €3,000 or more, as a consequence of this Bill - that is just the way it is. Some elements of the Government, backed up by some toxic parts of politics, are playing a dirty game of blaming not those at the top but the most vulnerable people in our society, suggesting that asylum seekers are adding to people in emergency accommodation or whatever. Not only is this stuff factually inaccurate, but it is a dirty trick designed to distract attention away from Fianna Fáil, from Fine Gael and from those who benefit from the housing crisis. The other part of the Government strategy is to suggest that there is no alternative and that nobody has any policies. We can do whatever we want about policies, such as writing books, but we will still hear the Government say that these people have no ideas. The Government says it day in, day out on social media clips just to create the idea that there is no alternative. "There is no alternative" is the mantra that is pushed on people. It is incumbent on us to get the message across that there is an alternative and it starts from the opposite point of view. The Government starts from the point of view of what will make landlords and developers happy. When it is speaking to the public, it adds onto that the idea that it will close the viability gap, which is this new term that has entered politics just in the last year or so and has become the thing to dress up how the Government wants to make developers and institutional investors have even more profits than they currently have. Our starting point is instead what will resolve the housing crisis. What will mean the basic thing of people being able to access affordable, quality, decent housing? It should not be too much to ask in one of the richest countries in the world in 2026, but if one starts from that standpoint, one comes up with a Bill that points in the opposite direction to what the Government is doing in the main with this Bill and comes up with things like the amendments that we are debating today.

Sentiment score: -0.03