Two things occur to me in relation to this Bill, which I strongly oppose. It is a very dangerous Bill that will cause huge hardship for an awful lot of people. Listening to some of the contributions over the course of this afternoon, I have felt like I am in a parallel universe. The first thing to say is that there must be prioritisation here. There must be a recognition of what is fundamental here. I believe in rules that are fair and I believe that adequate resources should be provided to ensure that decisions are enforced where landlords have legitimate grievances. However, we are treating the two considerations as equal when these are people's homes. They are where people live. When they are evicted, they cannot find accommodation and potentially end up homeless for extended periods of time. Treating the two considerations as if they are roughly equivalent makes no sense to me. The rules should absolutely be fair, enforceable and applied. Resources are needed for that but to treat these considerations as one and the same is wrong. This legislation is based on an assumption that is completely untrue, which is that there is a functional market. There is no functional market. The rental market is completely dysfunctional. It is broken and has been for a really long time. The Minister of State is talking about the new tenancies that are going to be established. With the complications involved in these five new different types of tenancies, it will be impossible for landlords and tenants to work out what to do. These new tenancies are going to be matched to market rents, as if market rents are not completely out of reach for a huge number of people. There are tenants out there who are paying €1,600, €1,700 and up to €2,000 in rent, depending on where they are. Some of them are paying childcare fees on top of that, along with a million other things. How are those people supposed to make ends meet? This creates an incentive for people to be moved out of properties and new tenancies established. In that case, in Cork, you are talking about a difference of €308 in the county as a whole and €278 in the city. Over the course of a year, that is thousands of euro. It is a huge blow to people. It makes no sense whatsoever.

Sentiment score: 0.03