This legislation seeks to rewrite the rental rules for the seventh time in a decade. In his speech, the Minister spoke about moderating price growth. Bar the tacit acknowledgement in his speech that rents are too high, there is nothing in the Bill that will bring rents down. I looked on daft.ie recently and I found that within a kilometre of Leinster House, it is €695 a week for a studio apartment on Hatch Street, €4,500 a month on Tara Street, and for a two-bedroom apartment on Grand Canal Place, it is €3,600 a month. In what world is that affordable? Under the Bill, people who are already being forced to pay that level of rent will find their rent going up by 15% or 20%. I have no doubt that we will be back here, if not next year or the year after, then in three years’ time, debating this again. This Bill is going to put a rocket booster under rents in the private rental sector. Either the Minister or some other Minister for housing is going to come under undue political pressure and will have to come back to try to address this again. The rental market in this country is critically dysfunctional, and it is always renters who are forced to deal with the consequences of this dysfunction. The Government talks about certainty and stability but the only certainty with this is that rents are going to continue to rise, and they are going to rise faster than they have risen in the last decade. The Bill is confusing, incoherent and fundamentally unenforceable. The Minister claims that the legislation is about balance but we know that the Bill is going to put fuel on the fire of spiralling rents and evictions. It is renters who will continue to suffer. I do not understand how the Government thinks, in a cost-of-living crisis, that rents should be allowed to rise further. In my view, the Bill essentially amounts to the Government folding the tent and giving in to large landlords and Irish institutional property. They are the ones who wanted the rent pressure zones gone, and the ones who are ultimately going to celebrate the passage of this Bill. The Minister has figured out a way to almost remove RPZs by stealth because they will effectively be useless with the market reset mechanism. The biggest landlords will claim that rent pressure zones have all but killed institutional investment. They will point to the fall-off in apartment completions and claim it is down to RPZs. We know that is not completely accurate, and that rising interest rates and input costs have significantly impacted apartment construction. The empirical evidence of the impact of the RPZs on the supply of housing is limited. In fact, in their original 4% version, the RPZs did not have a negative impact on supply. I do not understand why the Government did not even consider reverting to the pre-2021, 4% rate instead of this convoluted, confusing mess. The only reason I can think of, to be honest, is to go back to what the Taoiseach said a year ago this week, when he went on the "This Week" programme and floated ripping up rent pressure zones. He said he was open to a "pivot". It is very clear from the Bill that when the Taoiseach went on the radio that time, he said the quiet bit out loud, and the pivot he referred to was ipso facto the removal of rent controls. As others have said, we know the sheer amount of churn in the private rental sector is going to mean that this legislation will effectively be the same as having no rent controls. The six-year rule will mean that while a tenant is protected at the beginning, they will be exposed to market rents at the end of the six-year period, if they even get that far, because we know the average tenancy is from three years to three and a half years. This Bill will lock renters into an inflationary spiral that is even worse than what we have already seen. The average length of a tenancy in a build-to-rent development is one year, which means the rent for renters in these developments is going to be reset to the market rate. It is going to go up and up every single year. The Bill makes a mockery of extending RPZs nationally. It effectively guts rent controls. This is the seventh time we have done this in a decade. The chopping and changing is leaving renters in what I can only describe as a shark tank. If we are honest, we are all seeing it in our constituency offices in recent weeks and months: the rising evictions, the notices to quit, and the landlords hoping to get ahead of the six-year tenancies and the restrictions that are coming down the track. The Government has nothing to offer these people except higher rents. RPZ legislation is meant to protect students. It is not meant to create a backdoor for further price hikes targeted at students. Students will be some of the people hardest hit by this. We know that students in this country, by and large, live in private rental accommodation and move accommodation every single year, as they are required to. Their rent is going to rise every single year. They are being repeatedly screwed. I look at my own city of Limerick, where the average rent is now €1,800. Rents in Dublin have gone up by 94% in the past decade. This Bill is going to put a rocket under that. If we look at the RTB data from quarter 4 of 2025, the average annual rent increase in a non-RPZ area was 11.6%. By allowing landlords to reset the rent in between tenancies, the Government is condemning renters in this country to at least an 11.6% rent increase. Given that the average rent for a new tenancy in this country is €731, the 11.6% increase means the average renter will have to pay at least €200 more per month. I have appealed to the Government on the floor of this House and to the Minister in writing to remove the market rent reset mechanism from this legislation. There are laudable elements to this proposed legislation but the rip-off rent mechanism renders every increased protection absolutely bloody useless. The evidence from the RTB's assessment of property price rental growth in Ireland shows that in 75% of cases when the tenancy turns over landlords increase the rent. This is why I have appealed to the Government and I have appealed to the Minister that if they are not going to remove the market reset mechanism, at the very least they should include a rent break. We need to give renters some modicum of protection against extreme rent increases. The one thing I know for sure is that when these rent increases come on board they are going to become politically unsustainable for this Government. I ask the Minister to bring forward amendments to put a rent break into this Bill, or at the very least to support an amendment I will bring forward. There is so much in this legislation that does not make sense. For example, the distinction between small and large landlords is something that nobody asked for. We will have a situation where we are going to have multiple different sets of rules for different tenants. There will be new tenants of larger landlords, new tenants of smaller landlords, and existing tenants of both. The level of complexity is going to make this virtually impossible for tenants to actually understand, never mind their landlords, and also for the RTB which will have to enforce this. This is a recipe for confusion and chaos. It means that renters, as they always do and as they always have done under this Government, will pay the price. The changes around security of tenure and the restrictions on eviction for sale should be applied universally to all landlords irrespective of the number of properties they own. That is the norm in other jurisdictions. The creation of the rent register is something in this legislation that I and the Labour Party have called for for some time. We proposed this as far back as 2016 and it is fundamentally necessary. Many of the issues with rent setting in this country are caused by a lack of data. We need to start this data collection process because we need to move to a long-term and sustainable data-driven model for rent setting. It is vital for tenants to know the history of the rent charged on their home so they can be confident that they are being charged the lawfully permitted rent. There might be some issues in relation to the Data Protection Commission but my concern is that the Minister and the Government should have used the Pobal HP deprivation index to more accurately pinpoint areas of material deprivation which in some cases, such as my own city of Limerick, are right next to affluent areas. The fundamental issue with this Bill remains. Despite all its intricacies, it leaves renters exposed to potentially huge rent increases with little in the way of emergency protections, given the average duration of a tenancy and the churn that is there in the rental market in this country. I am really concerned that we are going to see a return to economic evictions where people are literally going to have to leave their homes because they cannot pay the rent. This is why I have called for the rent break mechanism as a simple safeguard. What the Minister, Deputy Browne, has come in with here today is confusing, fragmented and will be impossible to enforce in the real world. In response to concerns I raised through Oral Questions a couple of weeks ago, the Minister said that all proposals would be examined and given a fair assessment. If that commitment means anything, I ask the Government to accept an amendment for a rent break. Renters cannot afford any more half measures, any more complexity or any more ideology designed to benefit institutional investors and property developers dressed up as protections and reform. This Bill as it is currently presented here is going to fail. It is not going to stop rents rising. It is not going to necessarily guarantee any supply. If it guarantees any supply, it will be expensive build-to-rent apartments in high-end developments like the Dublin docklands, and maybe some in Cork. It is not going to bring down rents. There is no vision here. There is no long-term vision for renting in this country beyond giving landlords and institutional investors whatever they want. Yes, Government policy must be focused on increasing supply but if the Government is serious about increasing supply, it could ensure it meets its targets for the first time. It has never met its targets for social and affordable housing. It has abandoned the annual targets for the private sector under this housing plan because it knows it does not have a hope of reaching them. We are not going to get the supply, and certainly not the supply of social and affordable housing we need, by offering up renters on a silver platter for developers and institutional landlords to devour. There has been little or no modelling done on this legislation. It does not make any sense. When the RPZ regime was introduced by the Department in 2016, extensive modelling work was done at the time. We need to see a commitment for a review within two years. I guarantee everyone in this House tonight that this is not the end when it comes to rent setting and renting here in Ireland. Rents are going to go up by an unsustainable level and the Minister, or whoever his successor is, will be back here again trying to fix it because this is absolutely botched. Go raibh maith agat.

Sentiment score: 0.02