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.

Sentiment score: 0.02