2026-02-11

Amendment No. 1 has been ruled out of order.

Amendments Nos. 2, 7 and 8 are related and may be discussed together.

I move amendment No. 2: In page 5, between lines 29 and 30, to insert the following: "(2) Within three months of the coming into operation of this act the Minister shall produce a report into the affordability of current rents and establish a board to reset rents to affordable levels, where the guideline for establishing affordability will be rents that are, in general, no more than 20 per cent of a tenant’s income. (3) Within three months of the coming into operation of this act the Minister shall produce a report into the establishing of a principle that the rights of a tenant shall not be affected by the size or type of the landlord and/or the date of the tenancy commencement. (4) Within three months of the coming into operation of this act the Minister shall produce a report aimed at establishing the principle of preventing "no fault" evictions.". The best place to be to respond to the Government's Bill probably is with the protestors assembling outside Leinster House. The Bill will make an already dire housing crisis even worse by allowing landlords charging extortionate rents that are unaffordable for huge numbers of people to reset those rents to even higher levels. It beggars belief that the Government is doing this unless one remembers that it is not really representing the interests of the people affected by the crisis but, rather, is representing the interests of those profiteering on the backs of the housing misery of others. There can be no other explanation for what the Government is doing with this Bill. My amendment No. 1 sought, in essence, to stop the Bill until the Government had looked at what its impact would be on the affordability of rents, had addressed the issue of no-fault evictions and had a plan to make rents affordable. In the absence of that amendment, which was ruled out of order, amendment No. 2 seeks to force the Government to do those things in the aftermath of passing the Bill. Of course, I do not believe the Government is in any way serious about addressing those issues, whether before, during or after the Bill is passed, because if it were, it would not have introduced the Bill in the first place. However, for the sake of form, let us rehearse the Government's argument. It is like the argument made by the US military during the Vietnam War that it needed to bomb villages to save them. The Government is saying that to reduce rents, it must increase them. It is perverse Orwellian logic. Rents must be allowed to be reset to even more unaffordable levels because somehow, by magic, that will make them go down at some point in the future. There is no evidence, ever or anywhere, of that happening. This is market dogma of the absolutely worst kind. The reason the Government is not bothered that it makes no sense whatsoever is that, in fact, the Bill will do what the Government really wants it to do, which is to further enrich property speculators, investors and corporate landlords. My view is that Members of the Dáil who are landlords should recuse themselves from this debate and should not vote on the Bill. It is absolutely unconscionable that we have a proposal that will jack up already unaffordable rents to even more unaffordable levels and that people in here who vote for it might benefit financially from it. That is outrageous. There is a disproportionate number of landlords among the Members from the Government parties of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael and among some of the Independent Members backing up the Government. The number is disproportionate in the context of the political parties in the Dáil and in terms of broader representation in society. Beyond the question of people financially benefiting, we have a Government that believes the nonsense that somehow property investors will solve the housing crisis. I kind of cannot believe it. The reason we have a housing crisis is because the entire housing sector was handed over by the State to property investors after the crisis of 2008 to 2009. Cherrywood, in my area, as the biggest residential development in the entire country and one of the biggest in Europe, offers a pretty good test case of housing policy. At the point when that development was taken over by the National Asset Management Agency, NAMA, and thereby nationalised and brought into public ownership, it could have been developed by the State to deliver social and affordable housing. Instead, Governments led by Fine Gael and subsequently Fianna Fáil decided to hand it to property investors. The consequence of this was that for quite a few years, those investors sat on the development because it was more profitable to do that than to build houses. We were actively seeking at the time for those houses to be built. We were not objecting; we were asking that they be built. However, the investors sat and waited for the value of those properties to go up and the housing crisis to get worse. Then they started to flip them to other property developers. Mel Reynolds said to me at the time that Hines probably made a profit on Cherrywood before a single brick was laid. It made profit from speculating on zoned land. What prices are being charged for the houses and apartments Hines eventually started to build there? The houses are going for €600,000 and €700,000, which is unaffordable for the vast majority of people. The rents being charged are €2,000, €2,500, €3,000 and €3,500 a month, which are likewise unaffordable for the vast majority of people. These homes will end up being owned by big property investment funds, large international pension funds and so on, which will charge these extortionate rents. Now the Government wants a reset in order that even higher rents can be charged. By the way, the developer does not want to build the town centre that is needed by the community because it cannot make as much profit out of doing so. That is where this stuff leads. The Government thinks these people will reduce rents as a consequence of allowing them to reset those rents upwards. It is absolute nonsense. This Government measure will increase investor profits, make rents even more unaffordable and lead to increased speculation. It will do nothing to reduce rents. In fact, it will do worse than nothing in that it will exacerbate the housing crisis. All of this extraordinary action is supposedly justified on the basis there will be some greater protection and security for tenants by way of the six-year rule. The problem with that is if rents are unaffordable and if people can still be evicted for not being able to pay the rent, which will be allowed to happen, then the likelihood of not being able to pay an unaffordable rent and therefore getting evicted is a lot higher. Some 60,000 to 70,000 tenancies end on a voluntary basis or just end. That means almost all tenancies - 60,000 to 70,000 a year - will end over a period of about a decade. That means all rents very quickly will be unaffordable. In Dublin, the average rent is €2,100 and they will all go up to the level of what is advertised on daft.ie. If we go on daft.ie and look for something now, they are €2,500, €3,000 and €3,500. All rents will be up to that level. There will be dramatic increases and that will happen all over the country, exacerbating the housing crisis and driving more people into homelessness because there is literally nowhere for them to go that is affordable. That is what is going to happen. I will mention a couple of other consequences of all of this. People who are on HAP will potentially get a double hit on all of this. Many of the people who are on HAP are paying top-up payments to the private landlord, and the HAP levels, inadequate as they are, are not adjusted for rent increases. Therefore, if your landlord increases the rent and you are on HAP, the top-up you have to pay is even more. Huge numbers of people are in serious trouble due to the top-ups they are having to pay because they are also paying a council-based rent and council rents are now going up as well. There is a change in Dublin city. They are moving now to increase rents in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown. It is being done in different ways in different places, but across the country local authority rents are going up as well. Some of the most vulnerable people will get a double hit because of what the Government is doing, driving even more people into homelessness and crisis situations. On the protection of tenancy thing, there is a loophole I guarantee will be exploited by the landlords now for those tenants where there is a little bit of nominally greater protection because of the six-year thing, though it is also possible now. That loophole comes into play if the house, the residence, is not suitable to the person's need. Do you know that means? It means a tenant can get evicted for their rental property being overcrowded. If a person with no kids then has a child, or a person has another child, the residence is now not suitable to their needs because they need a bigger place. A landlord can say, "Sorry, I am evicting you because there are more people in the house than there was when I signed the lease to put you in." That will be allowed for under the legislation. They will find ways to do that. Do these corporate landlords do that kind of thing? Oh they absolutely do. I have the living proof in a multi-unit development called St. Helen's Court which is across the road from my constituency office in Dún Laoghaire. I do not know how many times I have raised it. Eight or nine years later, the majority of the units, all of them perfect units, are sitting there empty since it was taken over by a vulture fund and then another vulture fund which tried to mass-evict the tenants. It eventually drove them out. We successfully resisted some of the attempts to evict people but eventually, with the grind of being threatened constantly with eviction and having to go to the RTB, people just left. Some of the people did get housed by the council. The majority of those properties continue to sit there empty because it suits the vulture fund for them to be empty in order that it can get beyond the existing legislation's restrictions on rent increases, eventually jack up the rents again and get around the existing RPZs. That is what they do. The landlords play the long game. They inflict misery on the tenants. They try to evict people, eventually drive them out and sit on the properties, in this case for nearly a decade. It is perfectly empty when there are people homeless on the street outside. They do this because it is profitable to do it and the Government allows that. It is absolutely shocking and now the Government is going to facilitate even further that sort of profiteering. There is a lot more to be said and I am sure my colleagues here will be saying many of those things but this is a disgrace. The best place for people who are worried about the housing crisis to be is out protesting. I hope we see more protests against this because the Government has really revealed its true colours on this one and we need to fight back. People who want something done about this housing crisis and who want to get affordable rents, secure and affordable housing and to protect tenants' rights need to begin to get organised on the streets.

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.

This Bill is a mirage because of what the Minister is talking about regarding security of tenure. There are things in the Bill about security of tenure that I would welcome were they in isolation, but we have a situation where the Government has a policy outcome whereby it has drafted a Bill that is so complicated and convoluted. It has made a policy decision that is essentially pulling in two separate directions. It claims it is trying to offer renters improved security of tenure but it is allowing landlords to reset the rent in between tenancies, which all but wipes that out. I will speak to amendments Nos. 7 and 8 in my name. I will also speak in support of amendment No. 2. My colleagues and I have all asked the Minister what modelling or analysis the Government has done in relation to this Bill. He comes back constantly and talks about the Housing Agency review into rent pressure zones. That review does not provide a predictable analysis as to what the effects of this Bill will be, which have been set out very well by the Deputies who spoke. I look at my city of Limerick, which the Minister of State and I both represent. We have had the highest level of rent increases in the entire country. I look at the supply issues we have and at what the Minister says about this Bill apparently incentivising supply, but the supply this Bill will incentivise, if it incentivises any, will be expensive, high-end, build-to-rent apartments. Such apartments do not get built in Limerick. With the market reset mechanism, the average length of a tenancy being three to three and half years, and the deficit we have in student specific accommodation in Limerick, I am concerned in respect of the city I represent that renters in Limerick will be on the hook for rent increases of at least 20%. I look back to the residential tenancies amendment Act the then Minister, Simon Coveney, introduced in 2016, which introduced the RPZ regime and the 4%. Flawed and all as that mechanism is and was, at the very least, when then Deputy Coveney introduced that legislation, modelling was done. Modelling was done that was targeted at areas with the highest and fastest rising rents. With this Bill, the Minister has not done anything to look at rent predictability. Not one witness who came before the Oireachtas joint committee on housing said this Bill would result in rents not rising any more or rents falling, and rents need to fall. They cannot rise any more. Renters cannot pay any more and every witness who came in told us clearly that this Bill will open tenants - tens of thousands of them - to absolutely extortionate rent increases. As my colleague Deputy Boyd Barrett pointed out earlier, there is a huge issue with HAP. The HAP limits, plus the homeless HAP and the discretionary HAP top-ups, do not go anywhere near what rents actually cost at the moment. With this Bill there will be a real return to economic evictions. People will be evicted because they cannot pay the rent. The truth behind this legislation is that it is for large institutional investors and big property developers. It is not for smaller SME builders. It is certainly not for renters. The Government constantly talks about balance. I find that term offensive in relation to this Bill because the balance is being struck against renters who cannot afford to pay what they are paying. As true as night follows day, the original Residential Tenancies Act that was introduced in 2004 has been amended 14 times. That means every 18 months on average the Residential Tenancies Act gets amended. I guarantee that the Minister or another Minister will be back because rents will rise to a level that the Minister and the Government will not be able to sustain. I have tabled amendment No. 7, the purpose of which is to require the Minister and the Government to conduct a review of the operation and effectiveness of all amendments made by this Bill to the Residential Tenancies Act to include findings and conclusions and that the review be laid before the Oireachtas. The Minister constantly talks about the need to incentivise supply, but we have not had any clarity about what this Bill will do, bar our analysis of what it will do to rent levels. There is no certainty that it will deliver anything like the level of supply needed to arrest the upward trend in rents. Rents have gone up by the bones of 100% in Dublin, for example, in over a decade and they will go up and up again. I simply do not believe this Bill will work. The Minister has not laid the evidence before us to show how this Bill will work. There needs to be a statutory duty on the Minister to examine what he has done, what the effects are and to come back to the House. Amendment No. 8 is similar. It is to insert a new section 3, with the heading "Impact forecast". It requires the Minister, within not more than six months after the Bill is passed, to publish a statement of the forecast of the impact of the Bill on market rents for the following years. The reason the Government has not done any modelling like this is that it knows that fundamentally what we are saying about rent levels, what we have calculated from looking at the RTB data, is what will transpire, if it is not worse, certainly in the short term. In this amendment, I am looking for the forecast to relate to a representative sample of tenancies. The general public, and most important the tens of thousands of renters who are terrified of the effects of this Bill, are entitled to know what the impact of these proposals will be, how much extra rent they will be forced to pay. It is beyond irresponsible to push a Bill like this through in less than 12 hours if the Minister cannot make such a forecast and if he does not and cannot model what the Bill will do, how it will affect rent levels in the coming decade, how much renters will pay and what the outcome of the Bill will be in terms of this so-called supply. We have asked questions like this nearly half a dozen times since the general scheme was published and I constantly get the same answer. What will we see with this Bill? For example, there will be new categories of landlord. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael backbenchers will come here tonight and they will not have the foggiest notion of what they are voting on because this Bill is so confusing and convoluted. For example, the restrictions for larger landlords should be applied universally because the tenants of larger landlords are usually tenants in build to rent properties, properties owned by institutional investors. Their rent is already unbelievably expensive and these properties are rarely, if ever, sold. For the tenants of the new so-called smaller landlords, not much effectively changes and the fact is that people should not be condemned to rent increases of 20% and possibly 30%. We will have a situation of the average length of a tenancy being between three and three and a half years, when it is ordinary working people, people on low incomes, who will have to, in some cases, pay 40%, 50% or 60% of their hard earned income on rent. This will absolutely crush them and the Minister has not set out at all empirically what this Bill will do to rents in the private rental sector. As I said earlier, more of this was done when Simon Coveney introduced the Bill at the end of 2016 which introduced RPZs.

As I have stated previously, this Bill will be deeply damaging for renters. When we talk about renters, who are we talking about? We are talking about families, individuals and young people who are trying to work, go to school, go to college and live their lives. This Bill increases rents in a way that will absolutely hammer people. Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Minister are completely disconnected from the reality of what is involved in trying to rent a home right now. If they had any sense of what it is like to rent or to try to find somewhere to rent, they would not be doing this. Earlier, the Taoiseach stated that this is what we have to do in order to get supply. The Minister also stated that this is what is needed to get supply and that at some point supply will increase and rents will come down. I have asked the Minister and the Taoiseach the following question on a number of occasions. Neither has answered it. At what point will this policy incentivise a level of supply that will bring rents down? Will it be in five, ten or 15 years' time? It is never. Rents are never going to come down unless they crash, and then we will have an economic crash. That is the only point at which rents are going to come back down to any sort of sustainable level. In the context of this policy, the Minister is saying clearly that Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Independents are willing to sacrifice these renters, who will have to pay higher rents in the coming months and years to incentivise a supply of housing that at some point will lead to rents coming down. My colleague Deputy Eoin Ó Broin referred earlier to officials. I asked the officials who appeared before the housing committee the point at which this policy will bring down rents. They said they hope that it will bring down rents. This Bill is based on a flawed market theory of housing that completely fails to understand how housing markets and systems work. They do not work like normal market commodities, with supply and demand and prices going up and down. I was asked about this earlier. Some might ask whether it is the case that if the market price is not what a renter is willing to pay and if a landlord can get that market price, is that not reasonable? However, housing is not a banana or a car. It is a fundamental human need. When people are faced with either having or not having a home, they will pay absolutely everything they can to get one. If the rent is determined by the market, landlords will squeeze as much as they can get out of it and people are forced to pay more and more. It is not like buying a car or a banana; they do not have a choice. They need a home, and so they spend everything they have to get it. That is why housing markets are regulated and why there are rent controls. It is the reason the Government brought in rent controls in the first instance, but now it is undoing that and has been captured and has once more bought into thinking that housing markets work like the normal supply-and-demand models highlighted in junior certificate economics. This is not junior certificate economics. This is people's lives. It is the lives of hundreds of thousands of current and future renters. The Taoiseach has told the Opposition that it has no monopoly on compassion, that those in government are also compassionate and that Fianna Fáil was and is the party of a social conscience. There is no social conscience in this decision. It is a cruel, crude, cold decision that the Minister knows and has agreed will lead to higher rents. Who is going to pay those rents? Has he thought about that? It is going to be families who are struggling to try to cover rents now. They are going to be evicted. This is the other flaw with the Bill. The Minister and the Taoiseach have both stated, very misleadingly, that this Bill is about increased security of tenure for renters. That is absolutely untrue. This is not about increased security of tenure for renters. All existing renters will get no new security of tenure. Again, the Taoiseach stated earlier that this will have no impact on existing renters. That is the point. It provides no additional protections from no-fault evictions for existing renters, so we are going to continue to see a tsunami of evictions. I am not sure how the Minister feels about the fact that we have reached the highest level of evictions in this country since Famine times. That is what we are seeing. I do not know how the Minister stands over that or how he stands over a Bill that will make the situation worse. Not only are we going to continue to have the pressure of evictions like those that are happening for various reasons, mainly because landlords are selling up, now, we are also going to have a situation where some landlords will be licking their lips at the thought that they can get market rents if they get particular tenants out of their properties and that they will no longer be subject to the inter-tenancy rent cap. The really disappointing part of this Bill is that it came about on foot of a decision that was made directly as a result of lobbying by institutional investors. The lobbying record, as I have stated previously, makes this very clear. Irish Institutional Property represents all the big institutional funds, including IRES REIT, Kennedy Wilson and Ardstone. I have a copy of the lobbying register here. It shows the number of times Pat Farrell from Irish Institutional Property has met with the Government in respect of these policies - there is a list of meeting after meeting - and to push for these changes. Killian Woods wrote an article about IRES REIT in the Business Post last August. It talks about how IRES REIT, which is one of Ireland's biggest private landlords, with more than 3,500 properties, is so happy. It states: From Ires Reit’s perspective, the most eye-catching change was the new measure that now allows landlords to reset rents to market rates between tenancies. Under the current measures, landlords are required to maintain rents at the same level between tenancies. The article describes how a representative of IRES REIT showed investors a chart which indicated that its average current rents are estimated to be 19% below market rent. The article then states: Under the new rent control rules, there is a windfall sitting there for the company. It has the opportunity to unlock an additional €19.9 million of rent a year by raising rents to market rate. IRES REIT is going to get €20 million a year from the measures contained in the Bill. Kennedy Wilson will be similar. The Government is going to give these investors €20 million a year as each churn happens, and renters will be required to pay the market rent. This Bill has nothing to do with security of tenure, renters or balancing the rights of renters and landlords. It is about giving a windfall to institutional investors in this country, namely large corporate landlords. That is what it is about. The Government has bought in - hook, line and sinker - into their idea that if we allow rents to rise higher, supply will increase, the unit numbers will rise and that will deal with the housing crisis. The complete opposite is the case. This Bill will make the housing crisis substantially worse. It is a disastrous measure for renters and young people who are stuck at home. It will put it more out of reach. It will put home ownership more out of reach. It is incredible really when we think how far Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have come from being the parties supposedly of home ownership to now being the parties of the big institutional investors. They are willingly making policy and laws to screw renters and the younger generation so that the institutional investors can make more profit. The Government is happy to stand over that. I mentioned earlier the disconnect from the human misery this Bill is going to bring about. What has really disturbed me about all the discussion about this has been that disconnection. It terrifies me because what it says to me is that the Government is not actually concerned about this mass of human misery and the social catastrophe that is happening because it is willing to inflict more. It tells me that what it wants to do and what it is doing is putting in place policies that do not solve the housing crisis or make housing more affordable but simply keep the market going. This is, ultimately, another subsidisation of the private market to add to the very significant subsidies the Government gives out. I put the figures together there, and between the VAT cuts introduced in the budget, the HAP that goes to private landlords and Croí Cónaithe subsidies, we are talking about over €1 billion a year going to the private market every year. The figure over the lifetime of the Government will be €5 billion. This is €5 billion it will give to the private market with no permanent housing in return and no public housing delivered. We are talking about €5 billion. The Government says it will not create a State construction company because it will take too long and the Government is not sure. A fraction of that amount would set up a public construction company to build genuinely affordable homes. The Government is not interested in solving the housing crisis. It just wants to keep the market going. It wants to keep the investors, the property developers, the banks and the system going as is because if it were interested in solving the housing crisis, it would realise that what it is doing with this is actually embedding an unsustainable market. That is what the Government is doing because these rents are completely unsustainable. I looked at the rents being charged on daft.ie and I look around the country. People are expected to pay thousands of euro every month. For example, in Cork, people have been charged €4,800 for a four-bedroom property. In Santry in my own constituency, the rent for a two-bed is €2,500 per month, the rent for a two-bed in Beaumont is €2,700 and the rent for a three-bedroom home in Galway is €3,000. This is a picture of the new units being built in Northwood in Santry. What are they charging? They are charging €1,900 for a studio, €2,600 for a two-bed apartment and €3,300 for a three-bed. This is before the Government's changes come in. When we look at the income of a teacher on €44,000, after taxes, we are talking about in the region of 117% of his or her entire take-home pay to pay rent of €3,300. If we take a nurse on €37,000, we are talking about 127% of his or her entire take-home pay. The percentage for a person on the minimum wage with take-home pay of €1,900 a month is 168% of their take-home pay. It is impossible to pay these rents. This is how the Government expects an economy and society to function. Where are we going to get our nurses, teachers, bus drivers or doctors from? That is in our cities. They cannot function in many ways at the moment because of these policies. It is deeply frustrating for many people around the country who are going to see their rents increased to market rent. It will not build one home for them. While it might incentivise a certain amount of really expensive apartments being built in Dublin, it will not build one new home in Carrick-on-Suir, Kerry, Louth, Donegal or Mayo. All the renters in those counties will face higher market rents, because all landlords will be able to bring the rent up to market rent when a tenant moves out or every six years in the new tenancies in those parts of the country, and they will not see one new unit from these measures. Not one new unit will be built by an institutional investor, which the Government is making these decisions for. It is a disastrous policy and it just shows how disconnected Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are from the reality of this housing crisis. Unfortunately, it is not going to work and the housing crisis will continue. What will the Government bring about? It will bring about higher rents for renters. It is deeply disappointing and frustrating and we will continue to talk about this in terms of the disaster that the Government is going to make worse.

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.

As I listened to some of the other speakers, I thought about some of the comments the Minister made at the housing committee and in this Chamber. I just do not get it. The Minister and the Minister of State, Deputy O'Donnell, are intelligent people. We have seen the housing crisis go from a crisis to an emergency. We know that homelessness is off the charts and homelessness is only recorded as people living in emergency accommodation. It does not include the people who are living with three or four generations in the same home. It does not include the hidden homeless, the true figure that is there. When the Minister and Minister of State look at the homelessness figures and the housing crisis and see house prices, rents and evictions going up, do they really, in their heart of hearts, believe that this Bill is going to solve that? I do not believe they could, if they are the intelligent men I believe them to be. The Minister and Minister of State inherited an unbelievable housing emergency and are they are desperate to find solutions. The big investment companies, the big speculators and the vulture funds came in and produced a document for the Government that they claimed would deliver housing. It will not. The only way to solve the crisis is through supply. It is by building social and affordable housing. Think of all the people who are living in HAP and RAS properties in the private rental market. If the Government delivers social and affordable housing and takes those people out of the private market, that frees up all the rental accommodation then for the renters who badly need it. I talked to a couple of people over the weekend. They said to me that this is so cruel. They might not feel the consequences on 1 March, but they will in the future. They are terrified because their rents are too high already. Their rents are through the roof. They are struggling to hang on. I talked to a girl who is college educated. She has a child. She can just about afford the rent. What happens when she cannot afford it? Will the Minister answer that question? What happens when her rent resets to the market value and she cannot afford it? This is a person with a good job and a good education who does everything right. What happens to her? Where is the support? This lady will not qualify for HAP or RAS. Do you know what she told me? She said that nearly all her friends are in the same position. They are renting. They cannot get mortgages because the price of housing is so high. The price of housing is so high because the Government did not build houses for years. It left it to the market. The Government has a fascination with the idea that the market will solve the problem. Fine Gael came up with this solution after the financial crash. Fianna Fáil should have learned from the financial crash that the one thing we cannot rely on to sort out problems in housing and health is the market. The major problems must be sorted out by government. Rents are not just unaffordable. They are crippling families. Some people will not be able to move for six years as a consequence of this legislation because, if they move, they know they will pay the new market rent wherever they go. I talked to people who live together even though their relationships have broken up because they have nowhere to go. I have been contacted by women who are in abusive relationships, either physical or mental. Where do they go with their kids? I have helped families in Cork to access emergency accommodation and then, within a couple of weeks, they are asked to leave because there is no capacity for them. There are consequences. When I became a TD I was told, "Thomas, you must always be aware of the unintended consequences". There are so many negative consequences to this legislation that the Minister is either not considering or he does not get. It is not only me who is saying this. We were all in at the housing committee, including the Minister and Minister of State, and all the experts told us that rents, evictions and homelessness will increase. What will also increase is profit for the big investment funds, vulture funds and speculators. They look at Ireland and see a place where they can make a profit. It goes back to "greed is good". The Government's job is to protect people and ensure they have a safe place to live and raise their families. The amendments call for a review and a report. The one thing I have learned since I came up here is to follow the science and the data. Figures do not lie, and what the figures have said here is that this Bill will have a catastrophic effect on rents and drive them through the roof. They are already too high. I spoke with a lady who is on a disability payment and receiving the housing assistance payment, HAP. The only way she can keep the roof over her head is that every month, her retired father gives her money. Her rent is so high that HAP is not enough. She is on a disability payment and only for her dad, she would be homeless. I know another family in the same position. I was talking to a man who explained to me that his brothers are helping him out with the rent. He had lost his home because the property where he was living was being sold. The family had no choice but to take whatever accommodation there was. The cost of that accommodation is so high that they cannot afford it and he is being supported by his family. What will happen when, as a consequence of this Bill, rents are driven higher? There is so much more I could say but my colleagues have touched on a lot of it. We all make mistakes in life. There but for the grace of God go all of us. The Government has made a mistake. Security of tenure for six years would be a positive step if it did not allow market rents to drive so many people out. People watching this debate realise what will happen as a consequence of this Bill finally being passed. The worry I have is the people out there tonight who do not know what the Government is doing and who will only realise the consequences of this legislation in the weeks, months or years to come. People will be left terrified and without hope. The Government cannot sort out all the problems but what the Minister and Minister of State can do is give people hope. This Bill will not give people hope. It will give profits to the rich and super-rich and will drive ordinary working people into the hands of moneylenders. What happens when people go to moneylenders and they cannot pay the money back? Where do they go? What happens when they borrow from family and friends and that money runs out? Where do they go? The Bill is a mistake. The Government is following the lobbyists and it is time to step back. We will work with the Government. I will leave the Minister and Minister of State with this. We will work with the Government to bring forward a Bill that will deliver housing and rents that are affordable and that will make a change for people. We can all commit to that but not to this Bill.

I wanted to get onto the housing committee. I am not a member of the committee but I welcome the opportunity to speak on this Bill again and support the amendments that were tabled, which relate to reviews, reports and caps. I have already said that I support the Bill in principle and the concept behind it but what is being proposed raises so many questions and concerns that, as others have mentioned, it is hugely unlikely to do what it is intended to, unless the intention is purely to increase supply and increase the profits of large developers and real estate investment trusts that are largely from outside the country. To give an example, I see the logic of providing exemptions for new builds linked solely to the consumer price index to try to get more construction going. I get the concept that the State needs to get other people building and more supply into the market. Eventually, that supply will, hopefully, stabilise prices or bring them down but there is a huge question over the market reset, as proposed here. There could have been a happy medium in which some form of an increase was provided but it was capped, rather than being entirely a so-called market increase, because, as others have said, housing should never be just left to the markets. It is about people's daily lives. I have a constituent who has fallen into arrears because it took them a long time to get a housing assistance payment. They are now asking if the local authority can give them homeless HAP because the landlord has indicated that they will take the homeless HAP if the council pays and the tenant they cannot pay the rent. The council is saying, however, that it is an existing tenancy, so the person, once they are evicted, will get the homeless HAP but they are now going to have to pay a much higher rent and the State is going to have to pay a much higher rent. The cost of HAP this year will be, I think, over €570 million. If that €570 million was used to build houses, we would get between 4,000 and 6,000 houses, which is not the number of houses needed. If you were trying to develop a system, you would not have brought in HAP in the first place, but we are kind of stuck with it now. That is the problem. As rents rise and people cannot afford to pay them, the taxpayer will essentially foot the bill. We have had various suggestions about housing, including that the State should become the single biggest developer. Successive governments have argued against that idea, saying it is not feasible, might breach the Stability and Growth Pact, etc. However, we need to look at the actual cost of housing delivery. We have not had a serious discussion about having a State real estate investment trust whereby people, through the credit union or some other means, would contribute towards the purchase or construction of housing. They would be stakeholders but it would be a social enterprise. There may be a return on the investment but it would be a lot less than the super-profits these companies are going to make. This approach would lead to affordable rents going forward because if it is left to the private market, the market will take its toll. I will digress slightly but the same principle applies. In Lucan, South Dublin County Council, in its wisdom, did not have its social enterprise company tender for the operation of the swimming pool. Instead, it was let out to a company called Aura Leisure, which is very successful and competent in its own field. However, there was no underlying subsidy. Now we have a public pool where people are paying commercial prices because it was left up to a commercial operator to manage it. In every situation where you bring in a cut, the developer or investor will take a much bigger cut than the Government or local authority would take in terms of the common good. I also refer to what others have said about the incentive to end tenancies sooner than would otherwise be the case. I think Deputy Boyd Barrett spoke about the situation in relation to an extra family member.

Yes.

There is no absolute clarity on whether a house would be deemed unsuitable because there might be, say, an extra child or a boy and girl and then all of a sudden there is overcrowding. The landlord can tick a box and they have an excuse to get them out and then look at ways they can increase their income. Those types of unknowns are very worrying. The one I mentioned on Second Stage was the mindset of landlords trying to find a way. They might think, “Sure I have a family member. We’ll try to get them into the house for a couple of months and that will cover the family need.” I also raised the issue, which was not answered, around enforcement. How do we know the properties are meeting the family need criteria? How many extra people will be employed to investigate it, for example? I have already mentioned that the Residential Tenancies Board is massively underfunded. It is 18 months since I submitted a case about a very dodgy landlord who has multiple properties, is in breach of multiple planning regulations and is not registered with the RTB, and there has been no comeback. I am sure that situation is multiplied throughout my constituency and everyone else's as well. We do not have those checks and balances. We have what in a sense is an attempt by the Government to do something visionary and be seen to tackle the crisis. It sets a new market rate and there is the 2% cap going forward. It looks very good in principle. However, let us take the smaller landlords, for example. I am thinking of a person who owns one property. There may be a number of TDs with one property although I know there are TDs with multiple properties where it is a business. I have been dealing with a lot of these types of landlords. From talking to people, the smaller landlord is the one who wants someone to mind the property for them. They often treat the second property as their own because they have inherited it or it is an investment so that when they are in retirement age they have a steady income. They might let a company manage it and they get a percentage of it. They would prefer to have a lower rent but with very steady tenants because, as well as the nightmare, greedy, obnoxious, unrelenting landlords, you also have a minority of tenants who are nightmare tenants. The small landlord wants an easy life and they are the type of people we should be encouraging to stay in the market and not the massive investors who are treating it as an income stream. The latter might be more efficient in terms of managing multiple property units but they will keep pushing up the prices. It is about affordability. As these smaller landlords are selling up, a lot of the homeless hubs are full and overcrowded, so when the tenant eventually finds a new place the rents have gone up massively and they may not be able to afford to pay those rents. If they are able to pay, it will be with the assistance of the local authority which in years to come will need increased HAP thresholds and payments, and that will come from taxpayers' money and State money, to keep the system going. All that money is coming from one source but it is going to the developers and the big investor funds - the institutional landlords. They are the ones siphoning our collective money away. That is why we need to look at housing as a social enterprise rather than for-profit. This Bill does make an attempt to do a noble thing. I will not get into attacks on the Government where people say it has no compassion or that everyone is in the pockets of investors. Although historically Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have received a lot of largesse from developers, I believe that has died down as a result of legislation that has been brought in. We do still have cosy relations between politicians and developers at an individual level, however, and we have to think about having a cosier relationship with our constituents – the people who are suffering through increased prices and rents – and think about their common good and everyone’s well-being. That is why I support the amendments. I support the concept of this Bill but we need to look at it more from the perspective of the individual or family living in the house rather than the people making the profit out of it.

I support amendments Nos. 2, 7 and 8 in relation to reviews and reports. The Minister and the Minister of State know what is going to happen here because we can see it already. We could see it from the moment they announced this in autumn last year. We can see what is happening – notices to quit are increasing, rents are increasing and pressure on tenants to move out is increasing. This is because many landlords – I am not putting all of them in the one box – and especially the bigger ones know that come 1 March the sky is the limit. This evening the Government is planning on ramming through this legislation. We are TDs but we are human beings as well. I ask the Minister and the Minister of State here to think about the people who are in private rented accommodation - I know some of them, and the two Ministers here know them - who are spending 50% or 55% of their total income on rent. That means there is not enough money for food, clothes, to heat the place, for their kids or a whole range of other things, and that is just the basics to get through life. I ask them to think about those people for a minute. Three Laois TDs will have a vote on this – one Fianna Fáil TD, one Fine Gael TD and an Independent, yours truly - and I dearly wish all three of us were voting together on it. I get that the six-year certainty around tenancy is a good thing but the problem is what the Government is bringing in on the back of it. It is a Trojan Horse. It will have huge implications. My amendment, and I hope we will get to it, is around trying to limit it to 2% or the rate of inflation, the CPI. Who is the rate of inflation not good enough for? Who is 2% not good enough for? Who is lobbying for this? Is the Irish Property Owners Association getting everything it wants? Are the developers getting everything? They have got everything they want – the VAT cuts, the tax breaks and everything else they wanted. I want to see more housing but what the Government is doing is a charter for misery and further misery. The Minister knows it and I know it because I meet these people – ordinary working people. These are couples, lone parents and all sorts of ordinary workers trying to get by. It is pensioners too. This is one coming down the line. People sitting here in ten years' time will have to deal with a tsunami of pensioners who are in private rented accommodation. The State will end up supplementing that if we do not do better about cost rental and if we do not do something to slow down rent increases. The RPZs were not perfect. They had some cooling effects but, despite them, daft.ie and other surveys show that rents for new tenancies in County Laois over the last two years have increased 15% to 16% over existing tenancies. If that is happening at a time when we have RPZs, what in the name of the Lord God almighty is going to happen when you remove all of this and you can say the market rent? The market rent is the highest in an area or district. The Minister knows how it is going to work. There is talk of how there will not be no-fault evictions. There will be evictions. There will be notices to quit for the simple reason, as I have pointed out numerous times, that the rents will be so high that people will not be able to afford them. The landlords who are inclined to have a rack-renting attitude face 1 March with this gift in their hands. Make no mistake - it will be used. I am not saying every landlord will use it but the rack-renting ones and the bigger ones will. Tenants going into new apartments and housing will face extortionate increases. The tenancies do not last six years, and we know there can be a quick turnover. There is a three-year provision for students. I have a granddaughter who is going to college, and she commutes five hours a day. She would not have a hope of being able to stay near the college, and it is the same for her pals. The simple reason is that rents are already too high. What is going to happen when this comes through in the private sector? The renters in Laois will be very hard hit. I am already seeing increases in the rent pressure zones. Despite some cooling effects, the fact is that new tenancies are already 15%, 16% or 17% higher in the last two years. A one-bedroom apartment across the road from my office was on the market for €1,750 per month. A very small house in Kilminchy was €2,100 a month. In Foxburrow, a four-bedroomed house, which was not huge, was €2,500 a month. People cannot afford that. Look at the average wage and take-home pay. Some of these people are paying for crèches and commuting, they have to make payments on two cars, and they are trying to save for deposits and do a whole range of things. They are literally strapped in trying to carry out all of this. For those landlords who are unscrupulous, the race will be to get to the top. I support the idea of reviews and reports, but that in itself will not be enough. That is why the amendment tries to limit this to 2%. I recognise there is inflation, and I am trying to be somewhat reasonable about this. However, this will mean that all impediments to skyrocketing rents are removed. Existing tenants in homes and apartments are being put under huge pressure and will be put under more pressure due to higher rents. This measure will provide a climate for that to happen. There will be strategic notices to quit, as I said, because people will not be able to afford this. I appeal to Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael TDs not to vote this through. This will hurt tens of thousands of tenants who are already struggling to keep their heads above water and who already have to deal with difficulties. I have never come into this House and said there is a magic wand. I know this is a complex thing to sort out. However, I also know that a number of things need to happen. Within the gift of the State is one of those things, which is to increase the supply of cost-rental housing for those who are middle aged and who will never be able to get a loan again, or perhaps those who have come out of a broken marriage. They need to be able to get into cost rental. We need to help those people and provide a not-for-profit option that will pay for itself over time. The Minister knows how it works. I remember talking about the need for cost rental here 12 or 13 years ago, when people did not know what we were talking about. I welcome the fact that the Government is moving in that direction, but we need to move more quickly. We need more of this. The mass production of houses is a drum that I have banged loudly in this Chamber. As I said yesterday to the Minister of State, Deputy Cummins, for the first time, the point has arrived with the council engineers and architects that we need to be able to mass-produce. Mass production means speeding up and reducing costs. While there has been a lot of talk from the officials in the Department about standardised design and so on, this has now gone a step further. There are real standardised plans so that houses can be the very same internally, although the outside texture can be changed if the county council wants to do that. That will enable matters to be speeded up and will remove a lot of the blockages. I say sincerely to the Minister and the Minister of State that they should do anything else they can to accelerate that. We do not want to drop standards, and I am not arguing for that. However, we need to do whatever we can to accelerate delivery and reduce costs. The money is there. We know it is taxpayers' money and we have used it well. I will certainly support anything we can do to reduce costs and increase supply. I recognise that not all of it will be provided by the State, and I am not arguing for that. However, the State is a big player. It is because the Progressive Democrats and Fianna Fáil in the late nineties decided that we would just opt out of social housing that we have the mess we have. We had the crash because the regulations were taken off construction and the banks, and we wound up in the situation we are in now. It is a difficult situation. I have argued over the last 15 years to increase the number of apprentices. We must do that because we cannot build houses unless we have the people. Let us try to attract back from abroad more of the workers who went during that period and might wish to come back now. We need to increase the labour supply and ensure we have sufficient workers to build houses. People want to save for a deposit, but they cannot do so while paying these rents. They are not affordable for young people or the cohort of middle-aged and elderly people I have referred to. I recently came across a couple who are almost 80. The local authority, Laois County Council, currently houses them. I do not mean to plámás the council, but it has really stretched itself to try to do its best. I know the Minister is there on Friday, which I welcome. It is always good to see Ministers in the constituency. The one message I would give to the Minister is to come and see what is being done. We want more of it, and we want it replicated in other parts of the country. I ask the Minister not to force this through. The Irish Property Owners Association is getting what it wants. The developers are getting what they want. However, tenants are suffering hardship, stress and misery, as well as workers, students, lone parents and ordinary people. Let us think about those people. Let us not force through this Bill tonight. This needs to be rowed back on. We cannot heap more pressure and stress on those people.

Deputy Stanley said we should not force through this Bill tonight, and I echo that sentiment, for many reasons. I agree with the amendments that are before us. Let us be honest. I hear a lot of comments about landlords. Landlords, unfortunately, include people who just have one extra house, yet they are still classified as landlords. I think it is very unfair for such people to be called a landlord. At the same time, I deal with landlords quite a lot. I have to deal with them. If a person is coming to you looking for a house, you are not carrying out your duty correctly if you do not speak to everybody concerned, including the council, the landlord and everybody else. Most of the landlords I speak to are decent, honest to God people. We have a real habit in this House of attacking them, as if they were all bad people. Where are we going to get the houses from? I scratch the back of my head when I hear too much criticism of landlords. Where do people think the houses are going to come from? They do not come up through the field like a mushroom in mild weather. They actually have to be built. They cost a lot of money, and people put a lot of time, effort and resources into that. Those people then need to make a genuine profit. These are difficult circumstances. I heard the phrases "unintended consequences" and "one size does not fit all". Unfortunately, this Bill needs a lot of fine-tuning. There are elements of it that we could agree with, but there are other elements that are going to cause problems, and I can see that too. The Bill is locking thousands of tenancies permanently below the market rent. That might sound good on paper, but in the real world, it drives landlords out. The 4% reset over four years is modest, predictable and fair. It gives tenants certainty and landlords a reason to stay. If people can never move, properties leave the market and tenants lose homes. This amendment is about maintaining supply, not enriching anybody. The Bill draws a hard line at three tenancies, with no explanation. That is completely out of step with the existing law. The Tyrrelstown amendment referred to ten units, not three. Many ordinary landlords in towns and villages exceed three units unintentionally. Raising the threshold restores consistency and fairness. Small landlords are not the enemy. They are the backbone of the rental sector, and people must keep that in mind. I am not a landlord. I just have one house, thank God, and that is enough for me. I have been accused online of being on Airbnb. I do not know where people get this cracked-up information, but it keeps them happy, tapping away with their fingers. I have only my own home, and I live there. Property rights do not disappear because someone rents out a home. If a landlord needs a home for a close family member, that should be respected. Grandchildren, siblings, nieces and nephews matter too. The Bill also fails families dealing with bereavement. If a landlord dies, the family should be allowed to sell the property. These amendments are about basic fairness and compassion. The Bill introduces a new criminal offence, including jail time, not for exploitation but for getting complex rent rules wrong. That is completely disproportionate and will scare decent landlords out of the market. Regulation should be firm but it also must be fair. Heavily criminalising people is not a way forward. There are unintentional consequences. I have been very vocal on the short-term lets in recent weeks. This is going to have devastating consequences for short-term lets, Airbnbs in small rural communities. The 20,000 cap came in yesterday, which is very much to be welcomed, but the bottom line is that people still require planning. I would say 98% or 99% of them are running for the last 20 or 30 years. They did not have or need planning. They were quite happy running their business and everything was above board. They had fire safety and all that checked, insurance and everything. Planning is a different game. I was at the committee meeting today, and the planning authority and the tourism board are all over the place. They do not know what they are doing here. The Minister needs to intervene on this matter. I have no problem with regulation. I had a public meeting last Friday and I have another one tomorrow night in Clonakilty on this issue. The rooms are packed. People are concerned they are going to lose their honest incomes. This Bill has unintended consequences. The Minister could look at our amendment, which is a waiver for people who were in business. Any new Airbnbs will have to be fully compliant. That is quite acceptable. Registration is not an issue with them. Communities do not have hotels so they dip in on the Airbnbs to bring tourists into the community. This Bill has positive points. I think it is being rushed through here, not just tonight but in general. It needs to be looked at again. Short-term letting is a very serious area. We welcome the change yesterday of the 20,000 cap but I still think there needs to be more changes here, because people require full planning, and they will. To be compliant, there are two boxes, have you planning or not. I know some people who are 30 years in operation or 40. My mother was doing Airbnb in Schull in the 1970s, believe it or not, although now she has passed on. Everybody loves to visit rural areas. The point is that many people, most of them females - farmers and people who need a little bit of a side income and try to work at home and do this business - are doing it for survival and now they are faced with the dreadful consequences of having to apply for planning permission, which will devastate their business. I would like the Minister to look at that area again. I would plead with every Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil and Independent TD not to vote for this until this confusion has been resolved. I do not think they are going to listen to me but I have to push from my angle to the best of my ability. The clock is ticking on this new legislation and we desperately need changes. Airbnb is hugely important and short-term lets are hugely important to people out there. They are contacting each of us in their thousands throughout the country. There are unintended consequences and it needs changing. My worry is if we push through this legislation tonight, the planning legislation is there, it is in place and it has to be acted on and it will be for the Minister, Deputy Peter Burke, to work on it. That is going to be landing on his desk next week, I am told. If this goes the way it seems to be going, we could see Airbnb as we know it ending in rural communities.

As we know, we live in a housing crisis. That is a supply crisis. We have a rental crisis which is a supply crisis, and we have a homelessness crisis which is a supply crisis. What we are endeavouring to do here is strengthen tenants' rights, which we are doing through security of tenure, which means tenants will know how long they can stay in a property, while driving investment. I say to Deputy Hearne that investment is not a dirty word. We need private investment.

I never said it was.

You stand up here and you are constantly attacking anything to do with investment. You seem to believe that bandying around the words "landlord" or "investment" is enough mud to keep throwing.

It is not mud; it is the reality.

Nobody in this House has a monopoly on empathy.

This Bill lacks it.

We are trying to solve what is a housing crisis driven by a supply crisis. What have we heard from the Opposition? Have we heard a single solution? The Deputies' only proposal - Deputy Boyd Barrett referred to misery - is to freeze the housing crisis into a permanent misery. That is what they are looking to do.

We want evidence for this legislation.

What they want to do is keep the current situation in perpetuity. What I need to do to solve the housing crisis is not simply about protecting existing renters. It is about all those people at home who need somewhere to live.

They will not be able to afford to be in it.

That means driving the supply of homes in this country. We have delivered more social homes in 2024 than in any year since the 1970s. We have delivered record affordable homes and last year we delivered over 36,000 new homes, the highest since 2011. We have to drive the supply and that needs investment. The Government is investing the largest amount of money in the history of the State into housing delivery. One in every three euro of the new national development plan capital funding is going into delivering housing. That is record funding. The State cannot deliver every housing solution. We need a significant amount of private investment. While we are doing this, we also have to protect renters. For the first time in the history of the State, we are introducing security of tenure. That is what the Deputies are going to vote against.

Not for existing renters. You give no protection to existing renters.

It is not true.

For those who are currently in a rental situation, their position does not change - for 240,000 renters it does not change.

They are still as vulnerable to no-fault evictions.

On the one hand, you want it to stay the same, on the other hand you want change.

No, I said very clearly and we say clearly, a ban on no-fault evictions.

In a single sentence earlier, Deputy Hearne said that the landlords are licking their lips, and that they are also getting out. At least when Deputy Ó Broin makes a hypocritical statement he sandwiches it to try to hide it a little bit. You just actually said it in a single sentence. It makes no sense.

It does absolutely. It is not a hypocritical statement; it is reality.

It is just word spaghetti in the hope that something lands or when you leave the Chamber you have got 20 seconds for your social media.

That is disgraceful. What the Minister does not care about is people is who are going to suffer these rents. We are not doing this as 20 seconds for social media. That is disgraceful.

I would love if my amendment was addressed. I would love that.

What we have to do is provide housing solutions. We have to drive the supply of homes if we are going to solve the housing crisis in this country.

That is a disgrace. Withdraw that.

That is what we are doing, while also providing, as I say, for the first time in the history of the State, security of tenure. That is the crucial part we are doing here. Deputies do not have to like everything in the legislation but they are going to vote against security of tenure. That is what they are going to do.

We are voting against rent increases.

For the first time people will have the confidence of knowing, in the case of large landlords, effectively they can stay there forever. They know they will be able to do it.

They will not be able to afford to rent.

There are certain exceptions for smaller landlords but they still know they will have at least six years. We know the greatest driver of homelessness is notices to quit. We are going to give security of tenure-----

But not to existing renters. At least have the honesty to accept that.

-----so people can put down roots, so people can feel safe and know what their personal situation is. I think it is quite cynical actually, the Opposition here. The Deputies are united in cynicism against this legislation. We cannot do nothing. If we do what the Opposition wants to do, which is freeze rents and have an eviction ban, it does not even retain the status quo, it is actually going to get worse because our population is increasing by about 70,000 to 90,000 people a year. If we do not increase supply at all-----

Build affordable housing. You are the one who is doing the false choice. Hypocrisy.

-----if we freeze the situation as the Opposition wants to do, that is the situation. We are delivering record affordable housing. In 2024 we delivered the largest amount of social housing since the 1970s and we will have the 2025 social housing numbers quite soon as well. That is what we are doing here. We want to solve the housing crisis. That is what we are working towards. I get what the Opposition is doing. It is playing on the fears and emotions of those people who are in a rental situation. We do not have that luxury. It is actually quite cynical to do it. What we are doing is making the tough, difficult decisions-----

To increase rents.

The Minister still has not addressed my amendment.

-----to drive the supply of the homes that we need. We have heard nothing from the Opposition about how it would actually drive the supply of homes in this country. A number of comments were made. Deputy Stanley asked why are rents going up in Laois. Again, it is because of the lack of supply. The only way that people in Laois will get homes to live in is by the supply of homes being increased. That is absolutely crucial right across the country. Record numbers of social houses have been delivered since the 1970s. The status quo only makes things worse. Why are we doing this? It is actually not being done in a hurry. We announced what we would be doing here today last summer. The Bill underwent pre-legislative scrutiny. There has been loads of time to analyse it. We are having a five-hour debate on it here tonight. There was ample time for people to assess the Bill and make-----

The Minister has not answered the question about whether rents are going to come down.

-----a consideration as to when we do it.

When will rents come down?

Deputy Hearne will have an opportunity to come back in.

The one thing that is guaranteed is that the rents are not going to come down if the Deputy's party continues with its policies..

I do not have policies. The Minister is the one who is in government.

We know that. That is exactly the point. You have no policies.

I do not have the means to implement policies. When are the rents going to come down?

All you have are slogans.

We will not have a back-and-forth, Minister. If the Deputies let the Minister finish, they will have the opportunity to come back in. The Minister should direct his comments through the Chair.

A Freudian slip from the Deputy there. We are driving on and addressing the housing crisis. We want to solve it in order that we can get people into the homes they need. That is why we are driving on with building social homes, affordable homes and private homes. It is also why we are bringing in stronger protections for tenants. In relation to the amendments, Standing Order 204 states the following: Twelve months following the enactment of a Bill, save in the case of the Finance Bill and the Appropriation Bill, the member of the Government or Minister of State who is officially responsible for implementation of the Act shall provide a report which shall review the functioning of the Act and which shall be laid in the Parliamentary Library. This means that automatic reviews of legislation always happen. We have increased the resources of the RTB by 70% this year alone. The board will support tenants and ensure that their rights are protected. CSO figures show that there was a 38% increase in apartments in 2025 compared with 2024. Our policies are working; we are going to drive supply and that is how we will solve the housing crisis, the rental crisis and the homelessness crisis. Simply putting the crisis that exists into a permanent freeze will not solve it. Peddling misery will not solve it either.

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-----

Extending RPZs.

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.

We have extended the RPZs in the county to cover areas that never had protection.

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-----

Where is the Deputy getting that from?

-----but what the Government is proposing and what it is going to------

The Deputy is concocting scenarios now that do not even exist. What is he talking about? He is trying to say that I am smirking or laughing. That is absolutely ridiculous.

The Minister of State was smirking.

It is not a back-and-forth.

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.

Look at the review.

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.

I could name a few Ministers before him.

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.

I was not listening.

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.

The Minister did not meaningfully address my amendments in his response to them. He spoke about Standing Order 197. The types of reports referenced under that Standing Order came in as part of political reform in 2011. They are often delayed, sometimes for two, three or four years in respect of certain legislation. God knows where we will be four years from now. There is no proper, thorough and standardised approach to how these reports are done. In 2017, the Oireachtas Library and Research Service did a very good analysis of the reports. It found they had been done in a very ad hoc way and that no committee has undertaken a review of any enacted legislation on foot of a post-enactment report. The reason I brought forward these amendments is that we know the Bill will cause rents to increase. The fact the Minister has not challenged that assertion in any of his responses is telling. It will become too politically difficult for the Government to sustain a situation where rents are allowed to be reset to market rate and to increase by anything up to 15%. If we are not back here discussing this next year, we certainly will be back here before the local elections. Where will we be then? Will people be paying €3,000 a month in rent? In fact, on daft.ie right now, there is a two-bedroom apartment just around the corner from this building that is for rent for more than €3,000. What will happen as a result of this Bill is that if we get any new supply at all, it will largely comprise build-to-rent units that most ordinary working people cannot afford. There certainly will not be any supply in Limerick city, which I represent. Large institutional investors will not get enough of a yield from building expensive build-to-rent apartments there because there is no demand for them. The Minister talked about record investment but the outcomes of that investment are, by and large, incredibly poor. I am always astonished when I hear members of the Government talking about affordable housing provision, given that approximately 35% of what is counted as affordable housing actually comes from vacant property refurbishment grants. The Minister has not addressed my simple question as to what the forecasted impact of this Bill will be on rents in the private rental market for the rest of 2026, for 2027 and for 2028. The fact he is pushing this legislation through without being able to answer that question is frightening. I agree with him about the need for increased supply and for private sector investment, but this Bill will not deliver anywhere near the level of private sector investment needed to meet housing need, particularly in areas outside Dublin and very niche parts of Cork. The reality is that for every year since 2021, the Government has been 2,000 units or more below its completion targets. It will fail again this year to meet the target. The Minister referred to the crisis in the rental market and the homelessness crisis. I always think of the key recommendation of the Housing Commission that social and affordable housing should make up 20% of all housing stock. At present, that proportion is around 10%. The fact the Government has not met the targets it has set itself since Housing for All was introduced in 2021 really highlights that it is looking in the wrong place for a solution to the problem. This Bill will not improve the situation. It certainly will not arrest rising rents or rising homelessness. The Minister should lay before the House a report setting out exactly the modelling for the Bill. We have all gone through the RTB figures and done the calculations. The evidence, as it has been laid out by me and by other speakers, is absolutely frightening. These measures will devastate renters, who are the most vulnerable people in the housing system at the moment.

I really am furious at the Minister's comments that this debate is about social media clips. It diminishes the seriousness of what is at stake here. I have been a Member of this House since 2011. I was here two or three months when a circular was produced by the then Department of the environment, within which responsibility for housing was a matter for a Minister of State rather than having a Ministry in its own right. That was because we did not then have the homelessness and housing crisis we have now. The need for housing to come under a senior Ministry arose from the housing crisis that commenced a few years later. There was no fanfare and no press releases from the then Fine Gael-Labour Party in respect of the circular of 2011. It basically said the Government was stopping direct capital investment in public housing and would instead outsource its provision. The word "HAP" did not appear at that point but it was the beginning of the idea. RAS was in place at the time but HAP had not yet arrived. I remember putting out a press release and holding a press briefing, which only one journalist attended. I tried to explain that the Government was proposing, in effect, to do away with the direct provision of social housing and that this would be a disaster. I remember when HAP was introduced during the term of the then Minister of State, Jan O'Sullivan. The debate in this House went on for hours as we tried to explain why the scheme was going to be a disaster because it would replace social housing provision by the State with outsourcing of provision to the private sector. Of course, that turned out to be the case. The other big feature of that policy was the then Minister for Finance, Michael Noonan, meeting with representatives of the vulture funds that were invited in to buy up all the distressed property. It was a deliberate policy. He met with people from 65 or so vulture funds in 2013 and basically asked them to take over all the distressed property in the hands of NAMA. We said it would be a disaster. For a brief while, the then Government had the housing sector in its hands. If it had started building public and affordable housing then instead of doing the exact opposite, we would not be in this mess at all. It had the assets and so on. A point worth making regarding foreign private investment is that the houses that are built are built by labour in this country. When talking about capital from abroad, all the money is digits on a computer screen but the homes are built on land here, by people here and with materials sourced here. Those people are either building stuff that is affordable, like social and affordable housing, or they are building to make a profit, which is what is happening at the moment. What they are building is unaffordable. Of course, they are building hotels and things like that as well because it is profitable to do so. Forgetting about all the digital figures floating around, there is a finite amount of labour, land and materials, regardless of whether it is being used to build affordable and social housing or to build something else. It was often not doing anything at all because, for periods of time, the people who controlled the land, the labour and the capital decided they would not build anything until it was profitable enough to do so, and that is what they did. A lot of the people who got the distressed assets from NAMA at a discount price sat on them or leaked the stuff very slowly. This is a very important point that the Minister needs to understand. Never, ever, are the investors he is looking to court, lure and incentivise here going to build to the point that their profits go down. Why would they? At the point at which they think their profits are going to go down, they are going to stop. That is what they will do. The idea that we will get to a magical point somewhere where rents and house prices go down somehow is just total fantasy. The only instance of that is a massive crash. That is what we actually got the last time we had this mad policy of dancing to the investors' tune. It never really stopped but the dire crash of 2008 resulted from this madness of doing what they tell the Government. Then the housing crisis ensued. At that time, for example, it was unknown, for me in Dún Laoghaire and for most people in the country, to have families with kids in emergency accommodation. It just never happened. There was a particular profile to people who were in emergency accommodation. They were often very vulnerable. You did not have families with kids in homeless accommodation when I first came into the Dáil. Now, it is absolutely normalised and it will increase because of this. Then, the Minister comes forward with a Bill and says, to use his own words, "We do not want rents for long-term tenancies to fall behind market rents". That is the purpose of this Bill. Under no circumstances must we have low rents. That is what the Minister is saying.

That is not what that says.

The Minister said, "We do not want rents for long-term tenancies to fall behind market rents".

Market rents can go down-----

That means low rents are intolerable; we have to have them higher.

The Deputy should not be misleading. Markets can go up as well as down.

Ah, stop.

That is in plain English. Just in case there was any doubt about the motive, at the beginning of this year, the Minister, Deputy Lawless, when discussing the Government's thinking, said: ... housing is about international markets. It is actually a spreadsheet in Zurich, New York or Antwerp, more so than a builder looking at a site in Longford or Roscommon, that is actually deciding what happens here. The point is, it should be the builder in Roscommon or Dublin or wherever it is, looking at the land we have that is zoned, available, serviced and so on. They should be looking at the labour we have available and saying we need houses for the people in this community, so let us build them. If we could do it in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s on a pretty big scale, when the country was virtually a third-world country, we can certainly do it now with enormous budget surpluses and record economic growth. If we look at the Central Bank figures on wealth, I think household wealth in this country is €1.3 trillion now, with about half of it sitting in the banks. The credit unions were banging down the Government's door for years saying they had €4 billion or €5 billion they were willing to put into housing, no problem. On the idea that we do not have suggestions, People Before Profit produced a policy document a few years ago titled, A State Construction Company. Two other parties have similar views on a State construction company. Let us build on the land we have and employ people directly. Rather than them building unaffordable stuff, let us have them build affordable stuff. It is unbelievable what the Government is doing with this Bill in terms of the position of tenants. I would defy any tenant at the end of this to know what sort of tenant they are. Are they a tenant of a big landlord or of a small landlord? Are they a student tenant? There are different rules for them. Are they a tenant post-March 2026 or pre-2026? Even for pre-2026 tenants, there is a different demarcation depending on whether the tenancy is from before or after 2022. We are going to have great fun trying to figure out even what sort of tenants we are talking about and what position they are in. The landlords, however, will know there is an incentive to get these tenants out so they can reset the rents up to the highest possible level. That will mean going on daft.ie and seeing if they can find three rents at €2,500, €3,000, or whatever price. That will be the result of all this. What are we saying? We are saying rents should be based on the ability of people to pay. We are saying people should not be evicted when they have done nothing wrong or, for that matter, as is the case now for lots of people, because they cannot afford unaffordable rents. People should not be evicted for not being able to afford unaffordable rents when more than €24,000 in after-tax income is required to pay the average rent in Dublin now. This is after-tax income, so €33,000 or €34,000 gross of a renter's income has to go to pay an average rent in Dublin. What are we talking about there? It is more than 50% of average earnings. If people cannot pay that, and in many cases it is much higher than that, is it their fault if they get evicted? It is not really, is it? It is the Government's fault that it has let rents go up to that level. Is what we are saying when we say keep rents down to particular levels really so off the charts that nobody else is doing it? Just to be clear, we want to reset rents downward, not just freeze them. I will mention four cities where rent control works. Vienna has a system of rent ceilings so rents cannot be put above a certain level. Some 43% of all the housing in Vienna is social housing and it has hard limits on rent increases. They have rents per square metre which are a fraction of ours - about a third of what people are paying here on average. In Stockholm, a renters' union negotiates the rents on a regular basis with the landlords, rent controls are used to set price ceilings and rents are set based on the utility value of the property. Without those rent controls, it is estimated that rents would be 68% higher in Stockholm than they currently are. Where else has rent controls? Barcelona has them. Rent increases are limited and they have ceilings and so on. Rent controls work there, and Berlin also has rent controls. The things we are proposing, and propose time and again, can be and are done elsewhere. The Government just does not want to do it because it and the landlords find it difficult that they cannot put rents up to the highest possible level. It, therefore, wants to pass legislation that will ensure landlords can do so, despite the housing misery that is causing for people. I think about the families who come in to me - I am sure they must come in to the Minister - saying it is their second year in emergency accommodation and they have been told they are 200th on the housing list. There is no chance of them getting a council house for at least seven or eight years. They are told to go out and find a HAP property. That means finding a property within the homeless HAP rate. They might be allowed to look for something for, say, €2,000 a month. No such thing exists. Imagine how hopeless people feel. They are told to go out and find something within that limit but it does not actually exist out there. Now, the Government is going to make that even more hopeless because people will be looking for rents of €2,500 or €3,000 a month, putting them in an even more hopeless position. For those few people who got a HAP tenancy but are paying a top-up - if they are on a social housing list, they would have to pay a top-up to get a HAP tenancy these days - this has already put them in a difficult position and it is threatening to drive them into arrears at any time. If there are any difficulties in their situation, any extra costs come in for kids or anything like that, they could easily find themselves in difficulty, but now those rents are going to go up. Almost certainly, the HAP rates will not go up to match that. Even if they do, it just means the State is now paying for it. Anyway, they will not go up to the level, so they will be in even more difficulty paying these unaffordable rents. That means they are going to get into trouble, people are going to get into arrears and they are going to get evicted as a result. That is what is actually going on. I do not know how the Minister can possibly justify this. The reason we are here, angry and talking about it is not because we want a social media clip. It is because, next week and in the months after, we are going to have to deal with the human misery that comes through the door of our offices as a result of what he is doing. That is the reason we are speaking about this and proposing that he abandon this Bill and actually listen to what others are saying. The Government has had its chance and has failed on housing. Maybe it might consider looking at some of the alternative proposals being put forward from this side.

I am here to speak on behalf of tenants and renters in towns in Laois like Portlaoise, Mountmellick, Portarlington, Mountrath, Rathdowney, Graiguecullen, Stradbally and so on. I am meeting people regularly, daily sometimes, who are struggling because of the situation with housing and the high rents they are paying. The Government is bringing in a measure. We have heard the RTB projections in the debate. The Minister can contradict them if he likes. It knows, and the people who look for this know, that this is going to lead to a further increase. The market keeps getting talked about, the altar of the market. The high priests at the altar are the landlords, developers and vulture funds. They are there as the high priests. During previous terms of the Government being in power, sometimes with the Progressive Democrats, that brought us to the Celtic tiger, we saw what the deregulation of the building industry did when we allowed people to self-certify. The taxpayer is cleaning up that bill in the form of the mica Bill and the financial bill for it and in the form of fire remedies in apartments. If I heard right, I think it is 20,000 apartments, a lot of them in Dublin, because of what the Government did at that time. The taxpayer picks up the bill - Joe and Mary Public. I want to represent those people who are paying that. I have been a Member of this House for 15 years, like Deputy Boyd Barrett. This week or last week we were here 15 years. This is one of the worst pieces of legislation and one of the most dangerous I have seen. That is why I am speaking passionately about this. I feel strongly about this and I am really concerned. I am not going to personalise anything and I am not looking to have a go at anybody, but I am concerned about what the Government is doing here. I told the Government to look back at when it adored the altar of the market in the early 2000s as we went through the Celtic tiger. Look at the mess it left behind. We are still cleaning up that mess. The taxpayer is cleaning it up. We are still paying the interest on the bank bailout from that time. We are still paying the bill for the mica scandal. We are still going to pay the bill for the fire remedies in all those apartments that people have mortgages on and they are renting in unsafe apartments around Dublin. I looked at one. One was on television. I think it was last night. The outside of it was covered in timber. You would think about Grenfell Tower. I am saying this honestly to the Minister and Minister of State. Who in the name of God allowed that to happen? Talk about a tinder-box. That is the conclusion we came to when looking at a repeat of the programme last night. I think it was a "Prime Time" programme in relation to the timber cladding on the outside of it. Dry timber was on the outside of it and no fire breaks were inside. That is what the Government allowed. The Government allowed the banks to give out money. I have met people who got loans from banks who never should have got them. There were loan consultants in banks. These jack-the-lads were smart lads. They were supposed to be smarter than the rest of us. They gave money to people who did not have the capacity to repay it. Why? The high altar of the market was adored and the high priests at it told the Government this was what was needed to do it, Seánie Fitz and the boys. That is what happened. I am thinking of one couple. They have been dealing with it for 12 years in Laois trying to keep them in the house they are in, and if not, trying to get them into social housing. They have had a notice to quit from Pepper hanging over them for 12 years. It has employed Mars Capital, Eversheds and all sorts of arm-twisters and debt collectors to try to turn the screws on these two people to get them out of where they are, who should never have received a loan. If you were a member of the loan committee on the credit union, you would not give them one tenth of what they got as a loan. I am saying that honestly. It is the high altar of the market. The Minister says, and stated repeatedly, that if we increase supply, we will have loads of houses and be able to reduce rent. I ask him to go back and look at the data from the last time his party was in government for a sufficiently long term. I am saying this to him honestly, just to be factual about it. Did rents go down in 2005 or 2006, the year we built 94,000 houses? Did rents go down in 2007? No, they did not. Supply shot up. We had loads of houses. In fact, we did not have people to fill some of them. Rents did not go down. I can think of all the estates around where I live. I live in the middle of a whole lot of new estates. I can think of those estates where the rents shot up. Some houses were empty. Landlords, developers and speculators who bought them were willing to wait for people to come along and rent them. They kept the rents high. That is what they did. They eventually got it. At the moment, unless the Minister is in a parallel universe to me, the people who I meet who are renting are already in serious hardship. They are paying a lot more, in most cases, than what people are paying on mortgages. That is a fact. Laois has around 13,000 people commuting out of it every morning. Along with paying for the car to get to work, mainly in Dublin or Naas or somewhere, along with that, they are paying for childminding and a whole range of things. They are already living a very difficult life. I can tell the Minister it is no fun. I am here to try to represent and put this to the Minister. If I do not do this tonight, I am neglecting my duties as a Teachta Dála. I am appealing to the Minister on this. If the Minister takes off whatever cooling effect the RPZs and the current status has, despite which, as I told the Minister earlier, rents on new lets in Laois have nonetheless gone up by over 16% in one survey and 15% in another compared with existing tenancies - the figures are there; they are not my figures - what is going to happen after 1 March? We need to stabilise rents. That requires rent limits. I have put in a reasonable proposal in my amendment that they would not go beyond 2% per year or inflation through the consumer price index, whichever is the lower. That is reasonable. We need to have some limits on it. We need to increase the amount of cost rentals. It is tiny at the moment. I welcome what is happening. I welcome the fact that the Government is moving on that and on affordable housing, but it is not enough and it is not quick enough. That needs to be accelerated. We cannot create a situation where people will suffer more hardship, misery and stress. There will be more evictions. One other effect of what the Government is going to do that has not been talked about is the wealth transfer to landlords and big developers. What will happen is when rents go up, it means HAP will have to go up and have to chase that increase in rent. This is a point the Government needs to take on board. The Minister and Minister of State will see the figures for last year on how much is spent on leasing, HAP and homeless accommodation. It is a huge part of the housing budget. I want to see the housing budget used well and to see us getting value out of it. The Minister is correct that it is taxpayers' money but the amount of that going on HAP and supplements will have to increase. Due to the measure the Government is bringing in, it will be chasing that. That is what happened with every other change it made, which made this worse. It had the same impact. The amount of HAP and that transfer of wealth from the public purse to these big landlords increased. We have to give people the space to be able to move towards buying. As was mentioned, there is a huge amount of money on deposit in this country. We have a very high level of personal debt but we also have a huge amount of money on deposit. I remember that in 2013 or 2014, the credit unions stated they had around €10 billion or €11 billion. I am open to correction but the figure was something like that. We are willing to use some of this to be invested in a type of housing bond where there would be a modest return on it for the people who invest in the credit union. The banks have that. There is a huge amount of money on deposit, which could be used, and used well, in investment bonds and housing bonds to build the type of cost-rental and affordable housing we need. I do not know why the Government has not considered that. I can only draw the conclusion that it is listening too much to the wrong people. I learned something very quickly nearly three decades ago as a councillor. If we listened to everybody who came in the door to lobby for this, that and the other, and did it and went along with it, we would have made a right mess of things. When we listened to them too much, we did make a mess of things. You have to learn from your mistakes. Sometimes, you have to do the right thing and do what is right by people. Money is there on deposit. We need to set up housing bonds and have them in place. We need to use that money and taxpayers' money well. The Government is using it to increase skyrocketing rents, which will happen. Everything that is there, all the evidence and all the projections tell us that. To chase and have that transfer of wealth to pay rent supplements to big landlords will make matters a hundred times worse. That is what is going to happen. As I said, three of us who are voting on this tonight, hopefully, are from Laois; a Fine Gael TD, a Fianna Fáil TD and myself. As the Government is framing the Bill without the amendments, I have to vote against it. This is not because I want to be obstructionist or do down any good suggestion. Tenancy certainty would be a good thing, as would fixity of tenure. Michael Davitt talked about it 150 years ago, when some of our great-grandparents might have been around, yet here we are now. The problem is what the Government is cloaking the six-year thing in is a Trojan horse for the other measures that will nullify and kill that for the reasons outlined because people will not be able to afford those rents.

Rather than answer the question of when rents will go up, how much they will go up by, when they are going to fall and giving any sort of sense of what will happen, the Minister just comes back with "supply, supply, supply". Supply is the answer to the housing crisis, but it is not the only answer. Housing systems across the world also have things such as rent controls, protection from evictions and measures for security of tenure, which the Minister himself claims this Bill is about. It is not all just about supply, supply, supply. Even if we take it that it is all about supply, it is about the type of supply. What type of supply are we building? The type of supply the Government is incentivising is one that is really expensive and unaffordable to the overwhelming majority of people. It is the supply of housing that I have problems with and, to be very straight, the institutional investors who are here. These funds and this model of housing are hugely problematic. Unlike the Minister, I have researched and worked in housing for over two decades. Academics, researchers and campaigners have analysed what the financialisation of housing is. Does the Minister know what the financialisation of housing is? It is a process whereby housing has been turned into an investment commodity and an asset. International real estate funds and wealth funds have been driving that agenda for over two decades. The Minister puts the real estate investment trusts across as if they are some sort of people who are here to help us out, but the Government is giving them our rents and tax breaks worth hundreds of millions. They are not here to help us out. They are here to maximise the rent and profits they can get. They are not here to provide affordable housing. They are here to lock as many people as possible into as high a rent as possible for as long as possible. That is their model. The Minister knows, because he is talking to them, that their financial model is based on an ongoing increasing rate of return. How do they get that? From ongoing, increasing rents. That is their model. We are building in a fundamentally problematic form of housing that is based on ever-increasing rents. These are the rents of institutional investment funds and corporate landlords, such as Kennedy Wilson, IRES REIT and Greystar. The Minister says there is no issue with this, but one in five of all rental properties in Dublin is now owned by institutional landlords and it is heading towards one in four. He claims that our policies will lead to housing misery in perpetuity, but the Government is embedding a permanent form of unaffordable housing supply that is not about delivering housing or homes but is about delivering investment commodities. I will come back to the Minister on the petty taunts that he threw claiming that I was only doing this for social media clips. He used terms such as "word spaghetti" and said that we are peddling in misery. What I am doing is not peddling in misery. It is highlighting the human cost of what the Government's policies are. I am talking about how its rent hikes will devastate people, cause rising homelessness and how it is inflicting massive misery. The misery here is what the Government is doing is normalising the misery of the highest number of evictions since the Famine. If the Minister throws petty taunts around, I will come back to say to him that what we are doing is, number one, highlighting the human cost, which he is unwilling to accept, and the solutions he is unwilling to accept. He said we have no solutions but we have put them out there. They are a rent freeze, a ban on no-fault evictions, a public construction company and investment from the €166 billion that is in private money. Solutions are there. It is really pathetic of the Minister to try to claim that we are somehow doing this for social media. For the last ten years, I have been highlighting the scandal of homelessness in this country. Ten years ago, I walked as part of a small march that was one of the first groups of families who are homeless. A child was walking that in her school uniform, with a little sticker on her back stating, "Help me. I am homeless". I am unlike the Minister. He has supported Governments for the past decade and stood over year after year of rising homelessness and not once did he speak out and say this is a scandal and that we should not accept one child being homeless. He voted, in the confidence and supply agreement, with Fine Gael and, since 2020, he has been in the Government and not once did he stand up and say what we are doing is wrong and that we should not accept one child as homeless. What did he do? He voted for the lifting of the eviction bans, which led to more people going into homelessness. One of the other decisions, which I described at the time as one of the cruelest decisions any Irish Government has ever made, was making a policy and lifting a ban on evictions when it knew it would lead to rising homelessness. What has it resulted in? Thousands of children being made homeless. For the Minister to claim I am doing this for social media clips is a disgraceful comment to make. It is absolutely disgraceful. I come here every day to represent the families and children across the country and in my constituency who suffer and whose lives are being damaged by the Government's policy failures. That is the truth. That is the reality the Minister does not want to face. The Minister's rental Bill will lead to more human misery and he is prepared to accept that as a price because he thinks it will lead to some supply with an increase of large institutional investor-funded apartments and he accepts the people who will not be able to afford the rents and will be made homeless as the collateral damage. It is a disgrace and I will keep calling it out in the passionate way I do and in a way that highlights that this is a social catastrophe that is causing massive human misery. I will not let one day go by when I will not call that out.

I thank all the Deputies who submitted amendments to this Bill. I have to agree it is a terrible Bill. The Minister said he is solving the housing crisis. I do not think anyone buys that. I do not think anyone out there buys that. I do not think the electorate buys that at all. The Minister and the Government are failing, like every Government before it. I find it scurrilous that he would accuse Opposition TDs, when they are giving scrutiny to a Bill he has introduced, by saying it is spaghetti words or that they are looking for social media clips. That is disgraceful and the Minister should withdraw that comment. I rise today to speak for renters, who, although they make up 30% of the population, are seldom heard in this House or in our public conversation. I am a renter. I have rented my entire adult life. I want to be clear that I have only ever had good landlords, people who were kind, efficient, kept good homes and were fair. However, my story is not representative. There are too many stories to count in my constituency and among my generation of unscrupulous actors in the rental sector who have exploited those without homes for their own greed. I will quote some of those who are renting in my constituency. On the question of security for tenants, one constituent said to me: There is very little security for renters and the laws meant to protect tenants do not seem to be enforced in reality, [which is a real question for this Bill]. There is no long-term certainty for tenants even though generations of families rent long term. If tenants can simply be asked to leave after five or six years, people are left worse off every single time. Another constituent who works in the public sector is in her middle years and has recently been evicted. She noted the reasons: The reason behind my eviction is obvious. Our current rent is too low, €1,100. I think what makes the whole scenario even more ironic is that the result of my work in the public sector is in fact extremely beneficial for the Government and the country. While I am finding companies that are non-compliant regarding their tax matters and getting them to pay what they must to the Exchequer, I am being let down by the State and I do not think there is any exaggeration in saying that. A third constituent said the following about being evicted from a tenancy only to find the place relet at nearly three times the rent. I lived in an apartment in Sandymount for six years. I moved in in August 2019. Last January, we received notice that the owner was selling the building and we would be issued with termination letters, which arrived a few months later. These also stated the building was being sold and that the tenancy termination date was 10 December 2025. Yesterday, my former housemates and I received notice that our old apartment was being rented again and the rent was going from €1,480 to €4,400 per month. I have also received a considerable number of emails from constituent tenants concerned about the cost of renting in Dublin and in my constituency. One simply said there is nowhere to live, no matter how much you earn. Another, not far from here, described the townhouse he lives in as having "five rooms, nine so-called licensees living in it, including me and my roommate who are sharing a twin bedroom paying more than €650 per person per month with no bills included". Most critically, a refrain I hear from constituents - and this is important because these are people who would consider voting for Fianna Fáil, but will not - including homeowners, tenants and even some small landlords, is that they ask the Government to please stop letting vulture funds and investment companies buy houses and apartments. I listened yesterday in this Chamber as the Tánaiste and leader of Fine Gael defended that practice still occurring despite the overwhelming public opposition. The Bill was only introduced to the House last week and is being rushed through this week at the last minute and I kind of wonder why. About 18 years ago, I was in college. I was renting a room for approximately €100 per week, which at the time was expensive. It was a nice place and I had a very nice landlord. It was September 2008. I distinctly remember hearing about another rush by the Government of the day to pass laws that would change the face of this country. I am, of course, talking about the bank guarantee, which plunged the country's finances into total ruin in an effort to appease international markets and international investors and bondholders. Here I stand now, many years later, a Member of this House, and I cannot help but think back to that act of the Government, an act of Fianna Fáil like this one, and notice the similarities. History, unfortunately, seems to be repeating itself. Instead of assuaging the thirst of international financial capital by putting the Government's fiscal position on the line, Fianna Fáil is now proposing to offer them the entire renting population of Ireland, including every young person starting out, every divorcee who had to move out, every foreign multinational worker who came here for a good job and finds a disproportionate amount of their income going to landlords, and every older person who for one reason or another does not own their home. The rush of this legislation, with the guillotine in mere hours from now, reminds me of that bank guarantee. Why is it that the great urgency of Fianna Fáil is always to pass legislation, enact law or make guarantees for international capital, but not for others? Where is the urgency for the emergency winter payment for people with disabilities? Where is the urgency to build offshore wind farms to bring down electricity prices? Where is the urgency for the needs of people and their children who are in poverty, while that poverty increases? Where is the urgency to actually build the homes? Why is that urgency only ever applied for international capital? There was a great opportunity in the renewed vigour of the Government to pass legislation this year, after one of the worst ever years for the passing of legislation. I welcome it, but it is not this. It is not a Bill to accelerate some of the highest rents in Europe in one of the countries with the highest concentration of institutional international capital landlords anywhere in the world. We saw what happened to the country the last time Fianna Fáil gave rushed gifts to foreign financial investors. In case the Minister has forgotten, it did not end well, for the country or his party. I fear the same will happen again as a result of this Bill and the Government will have sacrificed another generation on its altar of greed.

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.

I thank the Deputies. We have been here for nearly three and a half hours debating the first amendment, but that is because there has hardly been a single discussion from the Opposition on the amendment. It has been referred to but most of the debate has not been on the amendment itself. Let us be honest: if the debate was simply on the amendment, we would have moved on a long time ago. I want to address a number of issues. Deputy Ó Broin is using the RTB data for scaremongering. Those were his projections from that data. I completely reject his conclusion. I do not know what his conclusions or projections are based on but they are certainly based on no change. We are going to drive supply. Everything I have done since becoming Minister for housing has been to address the housing crisis in this country, and I have always acknowledged there is a housing crisis in this country. Everything I have done is to try to address the housing crisis to get people into the homes they need, whether they are social, affordable or private, for rent or ownership, or for people in towns, villages, rural Ireland or inner cities. We have to solve that housing crisis, which is what everything I am doing is doing. How do we do that? One key to it is actually driving supply - yes, the right supply - but we have to drive the supply of homes. Another rent freeze and eviction ban are not going to drive any supply whatsoever. What they do is crystallise the lack of hope for everybody trying to get somewhere to live because they are never going to get a home to live in. We have to drive supply. The situation at the moment is very temporary. We are now moving to permanent rent regulation in this country. We are giving certainty to tenants, landlords, investors and the State by bringing in a resolution to the rental situation in this country into the future. That is really important. The security of tenure element has been ignored. These reforms will ensure that, for the first time, tenants will have security of tenure. They will have a minimum of six years. With a large landlord, they will have a tenancy for as long as they need it, which is crucial. That is not the case right now. They can be confident about not receiving that notice of termination. It allows people to put down roots and have that sense of security. The number one driver of homelessness is a notice to quit. Deputy Ó Broin is right, in that there is a churn of about every three and a half years, but this security of tenure will change that. The Deputy's pronouncements are made on a no-change basis but this will lengthen tenancies that by giving security of tenure to people. The major obstacle to security of tenure under existing regimes is that people can issue no-fault evictions. That will now come to an end for the majority of tenants and, for a minority of tenants, we are substantially restricting those opportunities and giving people at least six years. That is what is in here for tenants. Opposition Deputies have all referred to landlords. Most of the criticism of this Bill has come from landlords across right across the board.

That is because the Government has not given them as much as they would like.

The Housing Commission recognised we could not continue with what we were doing. The Housing Agency investigated and recognised that we had some of the most restrictive rent controls in the world, which was killing supply of the homes that we need right across the country. The Economic and Social Research Institute, ESRI, said we had to move. We have to give people hope and we have to drive housing supply across the country. The Land Development Agency, LDA, has built 2,300 social, affordable and cost rental homes-----

-----with 1,900 this year and a pipeline of 12,000. It is driving the supply and the building of homes. Does Deputy Hearne want to know why I accuse the Social Democrats in particular with regard to social media clips? He stood up and started using hyperbole about the Famine. Deputy Hayes, sitting beside him, stood up and started talking about the altar of greed. What did he do the minute he sat down? He looked over at Deputy Hearne, gave him a wink and Deputy Hearne gave a big smile. That is why I accuse the Social Democrats with regard to social media. It is performative effort in here every single day. At least there is an attempt at policy on the other side.

This is about addressing the housing crisis in this country. We are bringing forward and implementing solutions. We are giving tenants security and we are giving certainty to tenants, landlords and investors so that we can drive supply. This is about giving hope and delivering homes for people. I want people in their homes right across this country, and that is what we are doing.

With regard to my amendment in particular and my request for an impact forecast on amendment No. 8, if the Minister is so certain that this is a permanent solution, which I do not believe it is, where is the modelling to forecast what it is going to do to rents in the private rental market over the next number of years?

We have had Housing Agency assessments.

Into RPZs.

We have to drive the delivery and supply of homes. We know that if we do not do this, we will not get the supply that we need. We have had endless modelling over the years. It is always based on a no-change basis. This is going to bring the change that we need to deliver the supply of homes.

Most of the points have been made about these amendments. I want the Minister to try to explain at what point he seriously believes the supply he is talking about is going to lead to a reduction in rents. Will he give us some indication? I think it is total fantasy. In the explanatory memorandum to the Bill and in his speech introducing the Bill, the Minister said that rents for long-standing tenancies should not fall behind the market. That is what the investors want. They are saying that if they have to deal with rents that are lower than the market, they are not going to build because the Government's rent controls are too restrictive as far as they are concerned and limit their ability to charge €2,500 or €3,000 per month. Therefore, they want the Government to get rid of them in order to incentivise them to come in and build. Is the Minister honestly saying to me that he thinks that if he does this, rents will fall at some point? I am interested to hear when he thinks that point is going to arrive because it has never happened before except during the crash and even then it did not happen for very long. Rents went down after the crash but only briefly. Can he tell me when he thinks rents are going to come down? Probably if he even thinks about that question, the likelihood that rents are ever going to come down is a total mirage and fantasy. Does he honestly believe that an average rent of, say, €30,000 per year or €2,500 per month, which is about €30,000 of after-tax income, is a reasonable level of rent to have in the capital city? How does he think people are supposed to pay that? I know very few people who think that is a sustainable rent. We have had a long debate on this amendment, so the last point I will make concerns why the Government keeps recycling the mythology that there has been a big exodus of landlords. There has not been a big exodus of landlords. There has been an increase in landlords. In 2023, there were 101,000 landlords in the country. I am sorry, that is not right. I do not have the right figures in front of me. In any event, the number of landlords has increased since 2023 and the number of tenancies has increased, so the private rental sector has increased and the number of landlords has increased over the past two years. If the Minister's argument is that unless we do tis, there will be a continued exodus, I suggest that there is a problem with his logic. Some might be leaving but there is a net increase in the number of people. The reason for this is because huge profits are being made by people who are landlords. How could huge profits not be made when they are charging the sort of extortionate rents that currently exist out in the market?

As soon as I read the Bill, I knew straight away, going by the data, that students would be badly affected by this. The Bill will have profound and deeply damaging consequences for students and we must call this for what it is: another failure of this Government's broken housing policy. Students are at the very heart of this housing crisis. Young people trying to make their lives better are having their dreams of education dashed because they either cannot find accommodation or simply cannot afford it. Some students are left with long commutes, couch surfing or sleeping in their cars and that is absolutely shameful. Our students are not met with opportunity but with sky-high rents and a market rigged in favour of big landlords and big investors. While we know that purpose-built student accommodation will be reset every three years, we also know that because of the Government's failures to meet its student accommodation targets, most students are going to have to go into the private rental market. They will have no protections and may see year-on-year rent hikes and unsecured tenancies in digs. Where is the protection for those students? Students deserve certainty, they deserve fairness and they deserve a government that stands on their sides, not one that continues to protect the profits of landlords over the future of our young people. This Bill must be amended, and students and other people put first. Otherwise, it will simply be another chapter in this Government's housing failure.

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.

The Minister has still not answered a fundamental question that we asked. Based on the introduction of the Bill, when will rents stabilise? When will rents start reducing as a result of the Bill? The Minister has not answered the question and it runs against all policy, which is supposed to be evidence-based policy, that he understands the consequences and impacts of a Bill but has not set out the core purpose, which is going to have significant social impact by resulting in rising rents. He accepts this but he will not set out when rents will fall as a result of this. Again, the Minister has not set out or accepted how renters who are forced to or have to leave tenancies are going to pay higher market rents. How are they going to afford it? Where is the income going to come from? In the Minister's view, what is a sustainable or average rent? In the Minister's view, what should we be aiming for in terms of average rents? Maybe he could set that out. What does he think is a sustainable and appropriate national average rent? The Minister needs to accept and make clear a point. While he stated that for the first time, he is introducing no-fault evictions, protection and security of tenure for renters, he is not introducing it for all existing renters. Can he at least have the honesty to state that he is introducing a form of security of tenure for new tenancies but that all existing tenants are still covered under the same situation whereby they can be evicted on a no-fault basis? That is a fundamental mistake with this Bill. Why will the Minister not accept our proposed amendment to extend no-fault evictions to all existing tenancies? In regard to the proposals and amendments we are putting forward, that is one of the core ones.

I will address a couple of the issues that have been raised. If a tenant involuntarily leaves, the rent cannot be reset under these rules. That is very important. You will always have tenants who will voluntarily leave. The number of HAPs in this country has reduced by about 9,000, give or take. That is as a result of the significant increase in social and affordable housing we have been delivering. People will always leave tenancies voluntarily. If they do that, a rent can be reset if the landlord was going back out to the market but if a tenant is in any shape or form involuntarily put out of the property, there cannot be a reset.

Except for breach of contract.

That is an additional protection.

Except for breach of contract.

Deputy.

It is just a clarification, I am not heckling. Except for breach of contract.

We have to drive up-----

Surely breach of contract is also-----

If the tenant breaches a contract, yes. In relation to the 240,000 tenancies and there being no change, I have said that multiple times, just as I have said multiple times that one child homeless is one child too many. Everything I am doing is about driving up the delivery of homes. The entire rental and housing market is always going to be dynamic, so I am not going to indulge the fantasy, as the Deputy refers to, of giving a date and a time for when rents are going to change.

Roughly.

We know if we do not bring in changes, rents are only going in one direction and that is up. As important is the fact that if we do not bring in change, we are not going to get the supply for those people who are living at home and need somewhere to rent, or as the population increases. Our population has increased by about 810,000 people since 2014. That requires an average of about 250,000 new homes, which is about what has been delivered. We need to deliver more to solve the housing, rental and homelessness crises and that is at least what we are doing, so people have somewhere to be safe and secure in their own homes.

Do any further Deputies wish to contribute? No.

Amendments Nos. 3 to 6, inclusive, are out of order.

I move amendment No. 7: In page 6, between lines 13 and 14, to insert the following: “Review of Act 3. The Minister shall, not later than 2 years after the passing of this Act, conduct a review of the operation and effectiveness of amendments effected by this Act and shall, not later than 3 months after the end of that period of 2 years, or on the completion of the review, whichever is the earlier, make a report, in writing, to each House of the Oireachtas of the findings of the review and of the conclusions drawn from those findings.”.

I move amendment No. 8: In page 6, between lines 13 and 14, to insert the following: “Impact forecast 3. The Minister shall, as soon as may be after the passing of this Act, but not later than 6 months thereafter, prepare and publish, including publication by electronic means, a statement of forecasts for the following period of 10 years following its publication in respect of the impact of the amendments effected by this Act on market rents for a representative sample of tenancies, together with such other information as the Minister may deem appropriate for the purposes of this section.”.

Amendments Nos. 9, 31 and 38 are related and may be discussed together, by agreement. Is that agreed? Agreed.

I move amendment No. 9: In page 6, between lines 13 and 14, to insert the following: “Notices of termination: temporary ban 3. Notwithstanding any other provision of this Act or any other enactment or rule of law, the period of 3 years commencing on the passing of this Act is deemed to be an emergency period within the meaning and for the purposes of section 5 of the Emergency Measures in the Public Interest (Covid-19) Act 2020 and that section, with the exception of subsection (6)(b), applies accordingly.”. This amendment introduces a new section to the Bill concerning a temporary ban on notices of termination. The section would, in effect, reintroduce the emergency period, which we remember from Covid-19. The emergency period was provided for by the Emergency Measures in the Public Interest (Covid-19) Act 2020. During that period, there was a statutory pause on all termination notices. We are in an emergency period now, as has been discussed at length. The Dáil has long since declared and recognised the housing crisis to be a national emergency. Under this section, there would be a similar ban, this time for three years from the passing of the Bill, on all termination notices and evictions.

I support the amendments, particularly the introduction of a no-fault eviction ban for all tenancies, and that no eviction could take place where there is an identified risk of homelessness to the tenant. This exists in countries like Belgium, for example, where people cannot be evicted when they have nowhere else to go. It is still shocking to me that we have the highest level of eviction since the Famine, yet the Government acts as if it is normal and acceptable. It is absolutely unacceptable to us that we are heading towards what is likely to be at least 20,000 households being served notices of eviction this year, if it remains in line with last year. Such people are coming to my constituency clinic, and every TD has been contacted by people who are in desperate situations. Someone contacted me just today to set out their case. They are a cancer patient and their husband is ill. They talk about being stuck in a renting cycle for 25 years. They also put off having children until they would be in secure housing, but now, of course, they are at the point where it does not look like it is going to happen for them. They describe it as follows: Yet again, we are being faced with eviction for no reason except the landlord is deciding to sell up. We are so tired of having to jump at somebody's whim. Being ill, they are exhausted. They describe the emotional and mental impact of this. They continue: We just want somewhere we can call our own, where we can be safe from homelessness, and not fear every knock at the door, letter or phone call. We have never been late with a rent payment or been in arrears. We have always kept up a good relationship with landlords. There are thousands of tenants like this up and down this country. The Bill, as currently put forward, without this amendment, does nothing for the existing hundreds of thousands of renters, who will still be exposed to no-fault evictions. The Bill does nothing to address their situation. That is why we feel it is vital that we have a ban on no-fault evictions, in particular where people are at risk of homelessness. It is also an opportunity for the Government if it is concerned about security of tenure, which this Bill is supposed to be about. If it was actually about that, the Government would accept this amendment and apply it to all tenancies.

It is worthwhile at times, when we are discussing these things, which can seem quite dry and technical, to just remind ourselves of the human reality. Literally every week, I have somebody coming in to me who is facing a date for eviction. This week, given the particular week that is in it, I had a lovely young couple come in to me. Both of them have been working. They are probably about their mid-20s. They are a lovely couple. Throughout the whole engagement with this couple, they had with them their young son, who has special needs. He is about two or three - a lovely little fellow. He has the same name as my son, coincidentally. He was sitting there smiling at me the whole time during the meeting. His mother was just bawling crying the whole time. Her partner had to keep reaching over to hold her because, as much as she was trying to keep it together to explain the situation they were in, she just kept getting overwhelmed with fear because their date for eviction is this week. They have done absolutely nothing wrong, nothing at all. They are terrified about the prospect of what is going to happen to them and their child with special needs. Both of them told me that they themselves, later in life, have been diagnosed with special needs and are on the spectrum. They are finding it really difficult to cope with all the forms they have to fill out, and trying to understand HAP, homeless HAP and the thresholds. If they get the working family payment, what might that mean? Would it drive them over the social housing income threshold and make their situation even worse? They asked if there was anything I could do, and so on. When you look at their position on the list, you would think not, unless these people get prioritised, and to get prioritised is extremely difficult. The bar is getting higher and higher to get medical priority because a feature of these things is people who often are not doctors second-guessing people who are writing letters on behalf of people, where doctors say this person should be prioritised, that this kid should not go into homelessness because it would be really bad for them, or that this person because of their disability should not be in a hostel. The council, because it has nowhere to put them anyway, says it cannot prioritise them because it is not a severe enough disability. My question to the Minister is whether anything can justify this. Can anything justify the tears of that mother? Can anything justify that little child who is about two or three with special needs being driven into a hostel in town? They are absolutely terrified. I do not think they will go to a hostel in town, to tell the truth. I would say they would probably do almost anything bar go there. It is a long way out from any sort of family support networks they have in Dún Laoghaire, but that is what people get offered most of the time in Dún Laoghaire because we do not even have enough emergency accommodation there. People get sent into town to a hostel. They might be in there, and then after a year or two they might get into emergency accommodation in Dún Laoghaire. Then they do not know how long they might be there. They could be just languishing there for God knows how long. Can anything justify that being done to those people, in the Minister of State's mind? Can anything justify them being evicted in that circumstance to satisfy the investors, to incentivise? What we are being told is that has to be done, to incentivise the investors. It is a small landlord, by the way, doing that. They were not saying awful things about the small landlord. It is you guys who manage the sector. It is you guys who create and sustain a sector that allows that to happen. To my mind, if the consequence of the sort of rental sector we set up is that this happens to this family and this child, there is something wrong. There is something wrong with that. It is just not right for that to happen to that child or that mother. It is just not right; I do not care what justification the Minister of State wants to try to put on it. We know, as a Deputy said earlier, that it is people with spreadsheets in Antwerp and New York looking at Dublin and saying they cannot put the rent up to €2,500 in certain circumstances so they might not build there, because it is not profitable enough. The human consequence is that lovely couple, the tears and the child going in. To my mind that is State neglect. We passed that referendum on children and passed the Children First guidelines, which say the State is culpable of an abuse if a child is neglected. To my mind, the State is guilty of an abuse of that child and of the wilful neglect of the well-being of that child if the child is allowed to go into homelessness. I hear the Government say it is working on prevention of people going into homelessness. No, it is not. It is allowing that to happen. It thinks that in order to incentivise investors, this is legitimate. It is not legitimate. It is illegitimate. It is absolutely outrageous that it can be allowed to happen. Can the Minister of State honestly stand over that situation? That is just this week's example for me in my office. I am sure others can talk about their experiences in the last week or two of the same desperate situations. It really struck me just how confused and desperate and helpless people were, pleading for help, and I am just thinking there is nothing I can do because that is allowed. It is allowed that they can be thrown out and allowed that they have nowhere to be sent but a hostel. Very often in my area people say they would rather sleep in their car or pitch a tent somewhere than go into town into those hostels. That is the human reality of it all. The Government has a choice not to do that and say it is not acceptable. It is done in other countries. The Government says it is not evicting people into homelessness, that that is not going to happen because it is wrong, and it can do something else to make sure that does not happen. It can provide secure, affordable housing for people like that couple and their child.

I support this amendment. I had a gentleman come to me a few weeks ago. He is a paramedic working in the ambulance service and he was homeless. He went through a relationship break-up. He could find nowhere to rent. He has a good job and is working. The only service he could be offered in Cork was Simon Community Night Light. You go in at 11 o'clock at night and leave at 8 o'clock in the morning. He was going to work at 4 o'clock. He was in the ambulance service. He was not sure what time he would be home at. He could not go to work for a few days because the only place he could lie down was in the Night Light. How is it possible? I had another guy in a similar situation. Where he was renting, the landlord, a small landlord, was selling the property. He was a security worker. He did door staff and worked in bars, nightclubs and fast food restaurants late at night. The doors close at half past 11, so he is sleeping in his car. Then if you are not engaging with the emergency accommodation, you are not classified as homeless. It is a catch-22. Because you cannot get in somewhere to put down your head, you are not homeless. How is that right? I spoke to a girl a while ago who is in accommodation and she and the other people in there believe the accommodation is not fit for inhabitants. It is homelessness services. She believes HIQA, or someone like HIQA, should be brought in to audit these properties. Where is their dignity? She is there with a young child. She has been in there for over a year. I know people who have done three years, three Christmases in emergency accommodation, people with children - Santa Claus. Some people might not get this but in Cork, and I am sure nationally now, we see a drop in homelessness by a small bit in December. I know some of the people. If they have kids, they try to go home or get into a friend's house so that their children can have Santa Claus. In January, they have to go back into the emergency accommodation. I am dealing with a man whose partner died tragically by suicide last summer. She was on the verge of a home being bought by the tenant in situ scheme and tragically she died. He now is trying to raise their three-year-old son. He contacted me over Christmas. I had to go up to him because he was so upset. I was seriously worried for him. Cork City Council knew his ex-partner. She was a lovely lady, a vibrant young woman. The weight of homelessness, the weight of not being able to provide a roof for your child, the weight of always being short of money and I suppose a thousand other things, because when you are in such a desperate situation - everything then combines on you. I was talking to that man. He works in the building line, he is in sport, hurling, mixed martial arts. He is a man's man, you would say. He cried to me on Christmas week because he had nowhere for his three-year-old child, his young son, and himself to go to. Jesus, this is what we are dealing with. The Ministers say this Bill will improve things. I do not believe it will. When will it improve things? We have seen an increase in evictions since the Government announced it was bringing in this Bill on 1 March. I am not sure the Government gets it. People now have notices to quit and that is an eviction notice. "Notice to quit" is the nice way of putting it. It is an eviction notice. They are not all going to hit on 1 March. They are going to hit in April, May, June, July - right up the whole summer. We will see a steady increase in the number of people becoming homeless. These will be more and more families. Even if you have a job, there is no security that you will be able to find somewhere to rent. I hold clinics on Mondays and I am now so busy that I am booking people two weeks in advance to see me. A couple came in to me last Monday. They told me that last year, their property was to be bought through the tenant in situ scheme. Happy days. Then the Government pulled it last April. I have the document that says that on 4 April last year, the Government pulled the scheme. Their landlord sold their property. They got €10,000 from the credit union to buy a mobile home to put in the back garden of a friend who lives just outside the city. They have two daughters, 11 and 13 years old. They told me about the shame the father has. He is a man and he is working. His wife is working and they have two kids and they are living in a mobile home. This is because the Government pulled the tenant in situ scheme. Granted, the Government reinstated it afterwards with new rules and regulations, which they would have still qualified for, but the landlord was so sick of waiting around for this Government that he sold the property and they were evicted. I will ask the Minister a straight question, which I asked Cork City Council, namely, who is going to give them a house? They are willing to pay, but as for the tenant in situ scheme, earlier the Minister, Deputy Browne, said he was looking to provide hope. Where is the hope for them? The Government also talks about preventing people going into emergency accommodation and preventing homelessness. The one thing that was working was the tenant in situ scheme and the Government broke it by modifying it. The representatives of the Government come in here and make promises to people. The only promises that this Bill will deliver will be increased rent, increased evictions and increased homelessness. I will finish with this. I swear to God I could talk about this all night because of the people I deal with every week. I do not know what I would do if I was in that position as a father knowing that there was nowhere for my children to go. Jesus Christ, God forgive me for cursing. How could any man or woman cope with that? How many children must become homeless before the Minister and the Government accept their policies are wrong? It is not just that they are wrong and not delivering, the policies are the problem because vested interests, vulture funds, speculators and profit are being put before ordinary, hard-working people who just want to have a safe home. How many children must become homeless?

I cannot accept amendments Nos. 9, 31 and 38. The Emergency Measures in the Public Interest (Covid-19) Act 2020 provided for an emergency period during which a landlord is prohibited, under section 5 of the Act, from serving a notice of termination. Section 4 of the Act provided that the emergency period could only be extended from its initial three months, under very specific circumstances in the interest of public health during the Covid-19 pandemic. The Government could, on the request of the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage make - after consultation with the Minister for Health, and with the consent of the Minister for Public Expenditure, Infrastructure, Public Service, Reform and Digitalisation, - from time to time, by order extend the emergency period for such period as they considered appropriate if they were satisfied that, having regard to the threat to public health presented by Covid-19, the highly contagious nature of that disease, and the need to restrict the movement of persons in order to prevent the spread of the disease among the population, the making of such order was in the public interest. As the emergency period under the Act expired on 1 August 2020, its provisions relating to residential tenancies are effectively spent. It would not be appropriate or legally sound to now use legislation intended to prevent the movement of persons in the interest of public health during a pandemic and to ease consequential rent affordability pressures, to introduce a three-year moratorium on tenancy terminations and rent increases at a time when thankfully, we have no pandemic to deal with. Irrespective of how the Opposition wishes to give effect to an eviction ban or a rent freeze, the Government rejects such policy interventions. We wish to grow the supply of rental accommodation. We want to help renters into the future. We know that some renters are facing significant challenges, which Deputies have articulated in their contributions. The State provides support and assistance, where needed. The Government’s new plan, Delivering Homes, Building Communities, will provide 90,000 affordable supports to help people secure a home of their own. Since 2022, 4,500 homes have been delivered by AHBs, local authorities and the LDA. There is a strong pipeline of future developments, with over 5,150 additional affordable purchase homes approved for support from the affordable housing fund across 22 local authority areas. From budget 2026, cost-rental homes will be exempt from corporation tax, making projects more viable and ensuring the 25% discount is maintained. The rent tax credit, introduced in budget 2023, has been of significant help for renters, with almost 400,000 people benefiting in 2023. In budget 2026, the credit was extended for three more years, until the end of 2028. As promised in the programme for Government, the amount of the credit will increase gradually over the lifetime of this plan. A lengthy eviction ban or rent freeze would hamper supply and ultimately, help nobody. We do not have to look too far away from here. In Berlin, the Government introduced a rent freeze that resulted in a 50% reduction in rental supply within 12 months and was struck down by the Supreme Court there. The Residential Tenancies Acts provide tenancy protections for both tenants and landlords. The constitutionally protected property rights of landlords have to be respected by the balanced provisions in both this Bill and the Residential Tenancies Acts. A landlord has the right to terminate a tenancy on one or more of the limited grounds for termination under the Acts. This Bill strengthens protections for tenants by restricting the rights of landlords to terminate a tenancy, including on the ground of family occupation. I encourage anyone at risk of homelessness to make contact with their local authority for help. For new tenancies, that is, first-time tenancies between parties created on or after 1 March 2026, a smaller landlord can only terminate a tenancy of minimum duration during its six-year term on the ground of occupation by the landlord or an immediate family member, which is restricted to a spouse, civil partner, child or parent, or both. A smaller landlord can terminate, as usual, on one or more of the limited grounds for termination at the end of this six-year tenancy of minimum duration. Landlords with four or more properties can only terminate a new tenancy where there is a breach of tenant obligations or the dwelling no longer suits the needs of the tenant household. As a result, I reiterate I cannot accept amendments Nos. 9, 31 and 38.

It is deeply disappointing that the Minister of State is rejecting these amendments. I also cannot wrap my head around the fact that the Minister, Deputy Browne, said he does not tolerate or accept one child being homeless. Right now, the Minister of State could prevent thousands of children becoming homeless in the coming months by agreeing to this amendment but he is not doing it. He shakes his head, but of course he could. The Minister of State, Deputy Cummins, referred to the emergency situation during Covid. This is an emergency situation. Of course he could if he wanted to. The constitutional right to private property is mitigated by the principles of social justice, as he knows, and the common good. In this case, I challenge the Minister to introduce it as we have put forward here. I challenge him to implement that and see what landlord is going to come forward, bring it to court and see if it does not stand up. The Minister will not do that just like the Government will not have a referendum to hold a right to housing to make housing a human right because it does not believe that it is a human right. As I said earlier, it is willingly accepting homelessness and levels of homelessness that are absolutely intolerable and has done for years. I do not see it as normal or acceptable for a child being homeless, but the Minister does despite his claims to contrary. If he did not, he would implement a no-fault eviction ban that would prevent thousands of families and their children becoming homeless. The homeless figures that we get each month are only the tip of the iceberg. Thousands more are being made homeless but going into situations of hidden homelessness. Deputy Boyd Barrett was right to outline the human cost of this and what the human reality is, which I also spoke about earlier. What is really sad right now is that we do not talk about the children anymore. We do not talk about the situations in Temple Street that I spoke about years ago where the doctors explained that they were seeing and are continuing to see, but no one talks about it, children presenting with their families with burns because they were in cramped emergency accommodation pulling kettles down on themselves. Babies were not learning to crawl because literally the space is not there. It is still going on. There are children right now in hotels, hostels and family hubs whose lives are being irreparably damaged by growing up in emergency accommodation. That is an emergency. That is the experience of thousands of children. I cannot get my head around how the Government will not implement a measure that it knows would prevent that for more children. The homeless services say that the eviction ban did prevent people going into homelessness and opened up a space where they could then work on getting those in emergency accommodation out. They were not dealing with a constant flow in of homelessness. That is one of the really frustrating aspects of the Bill. The Minister said the security of tenure this is going to introduce is historic and huge. As I have said over and over, it does nothing for the hundreds of thousands of existing renters. Yet the Minister could do it. He could accept this amendment. It is so frustrating to be here knowing that he could do something that would prevent homelessness, but he will not do it. It is a disgrace. It makes hollow all these claims he has made that he cares about homelessness, and he is treating it as an emergency. No, he is not. To treat it as an emergency would be to implement a no-fault eviction ban across the board. He said that landlords will flee and more landlords will sell up. If there was a no-fault eviction ban and a landlord did sell up, the family or individual would still be there. They could sell their property as they do in other countries, such as Belgium. Why will the Minister not do that? It is because he will not step up and state, "We believe housing is a human right. This is an emergency. We will take these measures." The Government is introducing a Bill that still very much does not addressing fundamental causes of our housing and homelessness crisis. We will continue to see it. Instead, the Government is going to make it much worse with higher rents.

If the Minister is not going to accept amendment No. 9, I plead with him to accept amendment No. 38. This amendment proposes to amend the table in section 34 of the 2004 Act, which sets out the ground for the termination of a tenancy. The ground specified in paragraph four of the table is that "the landlord requires the dwelling or the property containing the dwelling for his or her own occupation or for occupation by a member of his or her family". In my view and in the opinion of many people, this provision is much abused. This amendment proposes a balancing exercise that use for a family member should not be a ground for evicting a tenant if the tenant would be placed at risk of homelessness. Politics is about choices. The choice the Minister is making is going to increase homelessness. That is a fact. It is going to put rents up. In relation to my other amendment, there was 35% surge in evictions after the moratorium was lifted. I am not arguing for a permanent eviction moratorium. I am arguing for a moratorium to give us some breathing space. We will not get to it, but this is in a similar vein to why I tabled an amendment in relation to a rent break if rents exceeded 15% within a three-year period. When the eviction moratorium was in place, family homelessness fell by 39%. Like every Deputy and I am sure the Minister included, my constituency clinics are inundated with notices to quit. At this stage, I have over 100 notices to quit on the books in my office. I do not know what to tell people because in many cases they are being forced to leave their homes and if they are lucky, they will get emergency accommodation. Emergency accommodation in Limerick is often at capacity. On Monday, a man attended my clinic wondering how he would explain to his autistic child that the family were going to be made imminently homeless. Things have gotten so bad at this stage that all I am looking for with the first amendment is a breathing space and with the second amendment, to tighten up that provision to ensure that people are not being evicted on spurious grounds.

It was interesting to hear what the Minister of State said in response to the instance that I set out of the couple and their child. I was just looking through the details of the case. They brought their youngest child with them. As I was reading over the details of the case, I realised that they have a daughter as well. Their son is two-years-old with special needs and autism. He was just diagnosed. They also have a nine-year-old daughter who has complex special needs. I was looking at the email they sent me describing their extreme anxiety and concern about what homelessness would mean and all of that for them in terms of the services that they are trying to access. They are waiting for those services as well to get an occupational therapist for their kid and what they will do if they have to move to another area even if they tried to move to another area. It is interesting that the homeless HAP limit that they were given to allow them to look for somewhere is high as €2,525. They are looking all the time and cannot find anywhere. The Minister wants those rents to go even higher. They will in my area. They will go up to €3,000 and €3,500. In the hopeless situation that they are in, all the Minister of State said is that they should engage with the local authority about emergency accommodation. I said to him that they are being told, and families like them are being told week in and week out, is to go to a hostel in Dublin city centre with their kids. They would be absolutely terrified to do. That is why the mother of these children kept bursting into tears. I could see it. She was envisaging in her head the prospect of bringing her kids into a hostel. She immediately burst into tears. Her partner was desperately trying to comfort her. Has the Minister of State got any other advice? We are asking for the prevention of evictions of vulnerable children like these and of two lovely parents in their 20s, who are both working hard to try to make their way in life and contribute to society. If the Minister will not do what is asked for in these amendments, which is to prevent people like them from being evicted into homelessness, can he offer anything more than saying, when I have explained the reality of the situation, that they should engage with the local authority regarding emergency accommodation? Given where they are on the list, they will be languishing in emergency housing for years. Let us be under absolutely no illusion that already vulnerable children with special needs will be damaged by that experience, possibly forever. There is not a shadow of a doubt about it. The best we can offer them and the many people like them is to say they should engage with the local authority. This point is relevant to the provisions in the Bill. In the case of the parents I mentioned, because their daughter will soon turn ten, their need is for a three-bedroom home. When there are children of opposite sexes, they are not supposed to share a room after one of them reaches ten years of age. The parents now must look for three-bedroom accommodation, which is completely impossible to find. People can forget about getting such a property from the council. We are talking about being on the list for a decade. In their desperation, the parents asked whether there was any chance they could look for a two-bedroom property. It would still be very difficult to find one under HAP but there might be some chance of it. However, that is not allowed because it would mean they were moving into overcrowding. This is the dilemma. We go to the council and suggest that people in this desperate situation, to avoid homelessness, be allowed to move into an overcrowded place. Of course, if these parents are made homeless in the next week, which is the deadline by which they must leave, they will definitely be overcrowded if they have to go into a hostel in the city. Indeed, it will be worse overcrowding because they will probably all be in one room together, as are many of the homeless families with whom I deal. We can put such families into one bedroom in emergency accommodation but the councils cannot give them a two-bedroom home because that is deemed to be overcrowding and not to meet their housing need. There is a dilemma here for local authorities and it will be even more so the case if this Bill is enacted, because one of the grounds on which evictions are still allowed is that landlords, big and small, can evict if their property is not suitable to a family's needs, which includes where there is overcrowding. That is a justification for evicting families. We really are on the horns of a dilemma in that families might have a chance of getting a property that is very far from perfect and in which they will be overcrowded but if they do so, they are then vulnerable to eviction by a landlord. The latter might say the property is not suitable to their needs if at any point that landlord decides he or she could get more rent by getting in people for whom the property is deemed appropriate to their needs. That is the mess we are in. or more to the point, that is the mess in which families in this situation find themselves. They are absolutely terrified for the well-being of their children and for themselves. The Minister could stop this, even on a temporary basis. He said we should thank God we are not in a pandemic. The dictionary definition of "pandemic" does not just refer to a global epidemic but is also applicable to something affecting a whole country. There is, in fact, a pandemic in Ireland. There is a pandemic of homelessness and a pandemic of housing crisis. If ever a housing and homelessness crisis could be described as a pandemic, it is the one we are living through. It is a pandemic in the literal meaning of the word and it justifies taking emergency measures to prevent damage being done to the children who will be homeless if we do not come up with a better answer than sending their parents to engage with the local authority about emergency accommodation in Dublin city centre.

Nobody in this Chamber has a monopoly on understanding and compassion for families and individuals-----

We are looking for answers.

With all due respect, I did not interrupt the Deputy. Nobody here has a monopoly on compassion when it comes to the difficulties and challenges being faced by individuals and families regarding the shortage of housing supply, whether social, affordable or rental. At my constituency offices in Waterford city and Dungarvan, I deal with constituents in the exact same way as do other Deputies. The Minister and I are not blind to the challenges facing the public. We have a difference of view on how to address those challenges. The Government is investing record sums in increasing provision of social and affordable housing to try to assist the very people of whom we have been speaking. Our housing plan commits to deliver 72,000 social homes and 90,000 starter home supports. Contrary to what was said by Deputies on the opposite side of the Chamber, everything in this Bill is about trying to enhance protections to ensure there is a reduction in notices of termination. That is what is contained in the Bill. Deputies can dress it up and try to present and package it in a different way but the fact is there will be restrictions on notices of termination as a result of the measures we are putting in place. In his amendment No. 38, Deputy Sheehan seeks to restrict the grounds for evictions where a family member has to return. I ask him to consider that we want rental properties to be put on the rental market where, for example, a family member is going off to work abroad. Is it better for such a property to sit vacant because that person will need it on his or her return or for it to be put on the rental market? I would argue it is better that it be put on the rental market and put to good use while the person is abroad. The Deputy's amendment would prevent that person from being able to return to the property. Balances must always be found when it comes to putting legislation in place. That is why we are not accepting the amendments that have been put before us. It is all about balance and, contrary to the contributions we have heard from Opposition Deputies, the Government is trying to strike that balance.

The Minister of State said no one has a monopoly on compassion. I have a couple of questions for him and the Minister. How many children must become homeless before they admit their policies are wrong and are contributing to making homelessness worse? It is a straightforward question. Will they give a commitment that this Bill will not drive up rents? Everyone on this side of the Chamber and every expert who presented to the housing committee said it will but the Government is saying we are all wrong. Will they give a commitment that the Bill will not drive up notices to quit and evictions over the coming months? Will they give a commitment that the Bill will reduce homelessness? None of us believes any of those claims. I have asked direct, straight and hard questions. The Minister and the Ministers of State are telling us the Bill will help to solve the housing crisis and homelessness emergency and provide additional homes. We do not believe it will do so. We believe the result will be the opposite. We were told we were wrong by the previous Ministers, Deputy O'Brien, Simon Coveney and Eoghan Murphy. They brought in policies and told us we were all wrong and these would fix them. The Government is coming back here again now telling us we are wrong again when there are over 5,000 children homeless tonight, and that is not even counting the hidden homeless. Can we have straight answers to straight questions? The Minister, Deputy Browne, said there will be a review in 12 months after this legislation comes in to see how it operates. In 12 months' time, after this has come in, if rents, evictions and child homelessness increase, will the Government fall on its sword and admit it was wrong?

I want to come back in on that. Numerous cases were upheld by the RTB where it was found that this provision was abused with people being evicted from their property. What I am trying to do in this amendment is simply to tighten it up where there is a specific risk to the tenant being made homeless. That is all.

The Minister and I disagree. He is absolutely right that no one has a monopoly on compassion, but I honestly believe the Government has an obligation, as do I as a representative, to say something to the family I am talking about. The Minister has a responsibility for all the families who come into him. It is just not good enough to tell people to engage with their local authorities about emergency accommodation. Does the Minister think it is? I certainly do not. I have described the situation of the couple and I could describe an endless number of other cases that are on my books at the moment and people who are coming in week in, week out. They are absolutely terrified in their situations for their children. Would the Minister allow his children to be put in a situation that would damage them? I think the Minister would do anything – in fact I do not want to personalise this, because that is wrong too. However, any parent would do absolutely anything to prevent their child being put in that sort of situation. We should not be in a situation where we have to turn around and tell people that there is nothing we can do, and that their daughter and son with special needs who are vulnerable will just have to suck it up, as they will, and will have to go into that hostel even though it will be very bad for them. I seriously worry about the mental health of the mother in particular, after the engagement I had with her, about how she will be able to cope so it is just not good enough to say that. I hear from the Minister, as I have heard from successive Ministers, that the Government is developing policies to prevent people going into homelessness. If the Minister will not do what is in this amendment, will he please tell me what he is doing to prevent this and other families going into homelessness? Tell me. Is there another answer I am missing? Is there something I have not heard? Is there some policy the Minister is developing that will prevent this situation where the family has to end up in emergency accommodation next week? If the Minister cannot give that alternative suggestion, the best one going is the one being proposed in these amendments, which is, even on an emergency basis, to say “sorry, you will not be allowed to evict these people into homelessness". We need to freeze that possibility until we sort out this mess, which is certainly not the fault of this family or these kids. Whatever differences we have on policy and all the rest, we should say we will not put them into a worse position, an unacceptable position, until we have managed to sort out the bigger problem. That is what we are asking. Can the Minister tell me he has a better answer for them or is he just saying that he, I and Deputies Ó Broin, Sheehan and Hearne have to tell our constituents that there is nothing we can do and that at some point it might improve - we cannot say when exactly - when the investors in New York decide to reduce rents?

The Minister does not wish to respond.

No answer.

Do any further Deputies wish to contribute?

I have asked the Minister straight questions. At least, we should get answers to those questions. The Minister said a while ago that there will be a review in 12 months. If that review does not show an improvement in matters, will the Government fall on its sword, admit it is wrong and at least let the Opposition bring forward solutions? I asked three other questions about the rise in rents, the rise in evictions and the rise in homelessness. These are questions I am looking for an answer to.

Does the Minister wish to respond?

I answered on the amendments.

As the time permitted for this debate having expired, I am required to put the following question in accordance with an order of the Dáil of 10 February 2026: "That in respect of each of the sections undisposed of the section is hereby agreed to in committee; the Title is hereby agreed to in committee; the Bill is accordingly reported to the House without amendment; Fourth Stage is hereby completed; and the Bill is hereby passed."

As the gap is less than ten votes, and because of the outrageous legislation this is for so many families across this State, we are calling for a vote by other than electronic means.

Other than electronic means a roll call vote.

Under Standing Order 88(3)(b), I propose that the vote be taken by other than electronic means.