Eoin Ó Broin
Dublin Mid-West · Sinn Féin · Ireland
“It is disappointing that, when several journalists have contacted the Government and the Department looking to confirm on the record that HAP and RAS tenants are not included - we know that they are not - and set out why and if that will be reconsidered, instead of giving a straight answer that, yes, they have been excluded, and explainin…”
“Will it try to remove survivors when they chain themselves to the gates in protest, as they have said they will, or will it finally listen to them and hear their calls for respect, justice and truth? Will it buy the Bessborough site and stop this outrage from happening?”
“According to the latest summary of social housing needs assessments, 61,000 households are on council waiting lists, although we know a large number of them are single people. About 49,000 households at the end of last year were on HAP, while there were about 7,500 private sector RAS recipients of the 14,000.”
“We are setting out five specific sets of circumstances where that would be permissible. Under our scheme, the person moving from Youghal to Clonakilty would have to have a specific reason like taking up a job or education in Clonakilty or accessing long-term medical treatment, etc.”
“First, importantly it would be for both people on the list and people in receipt of social housing support, such as HAP and RAS. It is not just the 61,000 households on our council lists but also the 55,000 or so households in HAP or private sector RAS.”
“Sure. I thank the Minister of State for his reply. My natural disposition as a person is to treat people at face value, but ten years in this House has made a bit of a cynic of me.”
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“It makes no sense and I would like that shortened to six months unless there are extenuating circumstances. If they want to get commenced, they need to get commenced within six months of the extension of duration. I am genuinely concerned, which I say every time we do planning legislation, that there is a question of what extent the absence of public participation opportunities in the substantive sections of this Bill are compliant with the Aarhus Convention. There should be some reporting mechanism on that. I am also concerned about the impact on JRs but crucially - and I urge the Minister to take this on board even though I suspect he will not accept my amendments tomorrow - when the extension of durations is passed and enacted, there has to be some reporting mechanism.”
“The Minister might say the very bad decision the Government has announced today on inferior property design standards could be the thing that makes the difference. Somebody who is applying for the extension of duration should be required to submit a viability assessment setting out what it is that has changed and what is now available to them if they get this extension to allow them to build out. The reason this is necessary and could be done in a straightforward manner is we do not want people utilising this provision for purely speculative reasons or other reasons my colleagues will outline. If we had time to go through this more fully during pre-legislative scrutiny, we could have discussed flexible ways of doing this. Unfortunately, that opportunity was denied. An 18-month commencement period is too long.”
“There needs to be public participation but not a full-blown public participation as in a planning application process. It should be some mechanism, possibly like the public participation opportunities available in Part 8 relating to decisions made by local authorities, whereby if people have pertinent information that should be considered and is relevant to the considerations of the extension, the planning authority should then be able to access that. I am talking about something time-limited but compliant with our Aarhus Convention requirements. I am also concerned that there is no viability assessment. If somebody could not commence and had a viability problem, the question is: what will have changed to make the difference?”
“With respect to extensions of duration, for some developers, though not all, there have been viability challenges that have led to some planning permission not being commenced. Again I understand what the Minister is trying to do and I accept him at face value. If there is a chance of those commencing, we do not want to lose them and therefore, the principle of this is not at question. The difficulty is, because we have not had time to get independent expert advice at committee, we have not been able to undertake pre-legislative scrutiny, the practical detail of this concerns me. Some of my colleagues will raise additional points with respect to this but there are three points I wish to make. Again, these speak to the amendments I will deal with tomorrow.”
“There needs to be two changes, however, to this section of the Bill and we have tabled amendments to provide for a limited form of public participation because these can be significant, particularly given the long period it takes to get something through judicial review. I am also strongly of the view the practice guidelines issued by the Master of the High Court should be put on a statutory basis. There should be timelines coupled with increases in the number of judges, backroom staffing and resourcing for the planning and environmental panel of the High Court to ensure JRs do not take two, three or sometimes four years. My amendments give the Minister the power to make regulations to do this, which I will discuss in more detail tomorrow.”
“While the transitional mechanisms themselves are not objectionable, we have not had the ability to listen to the Irish Planning Institute, the County and City Management Association or public and private sector planners working in development as to how these will work in real time, which is regrettable. Regarding the pauses on judicial review, JR, it is hard to understand, given there is a provision in last year's controversial Bill to allow for such pauses for all new applications, why somebody in the room did not think about whether it should apply to applications currently within the JR process. It is eminently sensible. This is a provision I have no objection to whatsoever but we spent two years reviewing the 2024 Act and it was not provided for then. This speaks to the ongoing concern we have in planning legislation.”
“It seems the very fact this Bill is before us shows it was not right the last time and that does not inspire confidence for the present or future. With respect to the transitional mechanisms, it is hard to understand how these were not caught when they were being developed over a two-year period between 2023 and 2024. They are all very obvious and all I can suggest is the hardworking officials in the Department were put under unacceptable levels of pressure by the previous Minister and Government and stuff was forgotten or left out. That is not in any way a criticism of the officials - I do not envy their job in this particular area - but it is a criticism of the previous Minister.”
“While we waived the pre-legislative scrutiny, we expressed our deep dissatisfaction at the way in which this has been done. We have now learned from the Minister of State that amendments of an even more controversial nature, which have nothing to do with this legislation that I will come to in a moment, will be introduced in the Seanad. This is not the way to make good planning law. I am not against the core principles of the Bill. Even when the Opposition is not opposed to what the Government is doing, we have a job to do, which is to scrutinise and listen to external experts and professionals to ensure the legislation, which will affect the lives of thousands and thousands of people for generations, is gotten right.”
“That really speaks to the fact that so much of that controversial Bill was rushed. Large sections of it got very significant scrutiny from committee - the Minister of State and I were there - but almost all of the transitional mechanisms were rushed in as Committee Stage and Report Stage amendments with no external scrutiny or oversight. Whole sections of that Bill had not even been written. Some of them will be written by other Departments, such as the new cost protection regime to replace the current situation. It is just baffling that we are back here again, at the end of a Dáil term, dealing with complex technical planning legislation without adequate scrutiny. The Minister asked us to waive pre-legislative scrutiny and if we had opposed that, he would have accused us of wanting to delay developments. That is a fact.”
“I thank the Leas-Cheann Comhairle. I am sharing time with Deputy Gould. When Deputy Darragh O'Brien was the Minister for housing and he launched a once-in-a-generation review on consolidation of the planning and development Acts, one of his main arguments was that the 2000 Act had been amended so many times that the legislation was unwieldy, too difficult to understand and overly complex and, therefore, what we needed was a complete rewrite of the entire planning code, simplified and consolidated into a single Bill to allow planners and developers, public and private, to get on with their business, yet here we are, six or seven months after the passing of that very controversial legislation and only a fraction of its 637 sections have been commenced, and Government is already amending the legislation that was meant to be a once-in-a-generational change.”
“Until the Government accepts the depth of its own policy failures, things will continue to get worse. The Minister of State should not come in here and patronise us about being solutions-focused and constructive. For eight years I have stood here proposing alternatives, ignored by the Minister of State's predecessors and now by him. Until we see the radical reset of housing policy as outlined in the Government's commission's report, this crisis will continue to worsen.”
“The Minister of State's party and Fianna Fáil do not have the courage to publish them, put them out for public consultation and let us get on with providing clarity for people who want and need to live in rural Ireland. We have a Government with no urgency or ambition, which repeatedly says nobody on the Opposition side of the House has any alternative. I have one, a report commissioned by the Government, with 250 pages of alternatives, which it has ignored and thrown in the bin. I have another proposal from Sinn Féin, almost 200 pages of alternative housing policy, and other Members have provided others. There are plenty of alternatives but not the political will to accept the Government's problem is the policies it is implementing and the consequences for real people.”
“I suspect once again that failure will be writ large. In the newspapers today, DNG reports the average price of a second-hand home in Dublin is now €600,000. We also read that the promised revised housing plan is delayed; what a surprise. That means local authorities still have not been given their revised housing targets and therefore cannot commence the process of considering the rezoning of land, nor have they be given revised social and affordable housing targets because six months in, this Government has not been able to agree them. The Department is slowing down approvals for much-needed social and affordable housing, collapsing questionable public-private partnerships. I have to laugh when I hear the Minister of State tell us the rural planning guidelines are under consideration. They were completed two years ago.”
“I read the Department's amendment this morning. There is nothing constructive about it. It is an absolute embarrassment because of what it says not just to Deputies in this Chamber but to the people experiencing the hard edge of the Government's failed housing policies, which is that nothing will change. It is more of the same failed policies into the future. Yesterday, the housing committee had a session on homelessness. Niall Muldoon, the Ombudsman for Children, spoke clearly about the catastrophic impact of homelessness on children. He expressed his office's exasperation at the failure of the Government to respond to the many constructive proposals his organisation and others have made. He also spoke about how this Government is continuously failing children. On Friday, we will have the latest homeless figures.”
“I move amendment No. 9: In page 4, between lines 14 and 15, to insert the following: “ Report on ban on rent increases 5 . Within a week of the passing of this Bill the Minister for Housing will publish a report on the introduction of an emergency ban on rent increases for all private rental tenants, including existing tenancies, new tenancies in existing rental stock and new tenancies in new rental stock.”.”
“Instead, he has decided to go off on some track to try to misrepresent the Opposition once again. That is his prerogative. It is an issue that, because of the rushed nature of this, he gave no consideration to. When we ask for clarification, he refuses to provide it, but that is the Minister's prerogative.”
“Just to be very clear, I am not calling for any legislative change. A set of regulations were introduced in 2019 that do not work and are completely unapplicable. That is why in Dublin, for example, where we need a very tough approach to unregulated short-term letting, we need new regulations. We have been calling for that for a long time. All I am asking the Minister to do is clarify his intentions, but it is clear. He seems to be suggesting he will expect local authorities to enforce a set of 2019 regulations that are utterly unenforceable. All I was asking for was clarity. I am not proposing any change to the legislation. Given it is a matter that many Government members of the housing committee raised, I was inviting the Minister as a courtesy to clarify it.”
“That is not the proposal. I am asking for the Minister to clarify his position on it. That is all. It is a reasonable request. His own Government colleague from Fine Gael, Deputy Carrigy, the Chair of the housing committee, asked for the Minister to clarify and he ignored him as well as me.”
“They are unenforceable. It would be better if we were just honest with people and dealt with short-term letting through Peter Burke's legislation and the Minister's new planning rules. I am just unclear what the Minister thinks will actually happen in that respect after this Bill passes.”
“Whatever one's view of short-term letting in urban and rural areas is, that has created a situation right across the country where, in the overwhelming majority of cases, short-term lets are operating outside of planning law. It is not a bad idea for the Government to introduce a register, subject to the details. It is not a bad idea for the Government to have a twin-track approach on the planning side by differentiating areas of high housing demand versus areas where there is a requirement for tourist accommodation. I would like to see the details of all of that. In the interim, a change is being made and the Minister seems to be suggesting that, from the day after this Bill passes, he is expecting local authorities to enforce the 2019 short-term letting regulations in the new areas coming under the RPZ rules. That is not possible.”
“That is factually not the case. In fact, in the original rent pressure zones of Dublin and Cork, and also in the successive waves of rent pressure zones, those short-term lets operating outside of planning law continue to operate outside of planning law. The reason for this - the Minister was not responsible for it - is that Eoghan Murphy did not put any effective enforcement mechanism into the 2019 regulations. Dublin city and Cork city attempted, very valiantly, to enforce the 2019 regulations but, unfortunately, because the burden of proof is so high when one goes into court, which is what ultimately had to happen, they were not able to proceed.”
“To be very clear, my view is that the Eoghan Murphy 2019 regulations should not be applied because, first, they are unenforceable and, second, the Government and the Opposition are currently working on a mechanism to do that. Therefore, I am inviting the Minister to say that they will not be applied.”
“Therefore, I am not inviting the Minister to continue arguing with me about a three-year rent freeze, as we do not agree on that, but it would be valuable for him to clarify what his view is of the application of the 2019 short-term letting regulations on these new areas the day after this comes into effect until the short-term letting register and consequent planning guidance is issued by his Department.”
“We know that is not going to work anyway because those regulations are unenforceable. If that is not the intention, which I presume is the case because the Minister is working with his colleague, the Minister for Enterprise, Tourism and Employment, Deputy Burke, some clarification here or communicated to the local authorities would be reassuring for people. We all accept that there has to be regulation of short-term letting in high-demand urban areas as well as rural countryside areas, but what I have outlined is one of the consequences of the rushed nature of this legislation.”
“One assumes that will make a distinction between areas that are currently designated rent pressure zones, where there is a very high demand for rental properties and the need to take a very tough line on unregulated short-term letting, and a more flexible approach that will allow local authorities to have more discretion to ensure a balance between the tourism economy and long-term housing need. Given the fact that there are a lot of people engaged in the provision of tourism products in those rural countryside, high-tourism areas, who will be looking at this, I invite the Minister to use his response to clarify whether it is his intention to seek the application of Eoghan Murphy's 2019 short-term letting regulations to the areas that are coming in to the RPZs.”
“One of the issues the Minister did not respond to at the closing of his Second Stage speech was raised by his Government colleague Deputy Carrigy and I. One of the consequences of extending the rent pressure zones to areas currently not designated is that, theoretically speaking, Eoghan Murphy's 2019 short-term letting regulations would apply. Obviously, the Government has decided to take a different course, which is Peter Burke's short-term letting register, and the Minister, Deputy Browne, and his officials will produce new planning guidelines to go along with those.”
“It is to create space, in particular breathing space for renters, while better policies and investment measures for increasing social and genuinely affordable rental and purchase, but also for large-scale private sector investment for good quality homes in every county in the State for working people to buy, could be delivered. On that basis, I commend amendment No. 3 to the House.”
“I move amendment No. 3: In page 3, line 25, to delete "28 February 2026" and substitute "23 June 2028". The amendments in this group are straightforward. They are connected to amendment No. 1, the purpose of which was to ensure that rent could not be set above zero, effectively giving rise to a ban on rent increases. This was to change the principal Act and the amending legislation in order that the ban would last for three years. As I articulated on Second Stage and while speaking on the first group of amendments this evening, our view is that renters are paying rents that are too high and that we need an emergency ban on rent increases. That should be for a period of three years. Crucially, and contrary to the misrepresentation by the Minister earlier, it is not a question of doing this and nothing else.”
“Ultimately, this comes down to choices. The choice in the debate today is very simple. Does the Minister want a policy that will allow the rate of increase of rents for renters to accelerate at a greater pace this year, next year and the year after that or does he say enough is enough, renters cannot afford further rent increases and we have to stop it right now? That is what the amendments are about and I commend them to the House.”
“This is something the Minister's predecessor did not understand, and it seems the Minister and his colleagues do not understand it today. I make no apology for saying that a Government that stands up for renters should stop rent increases for an emergency period. This would not be indefinitely or in perpetuity but for an emergency period. It would create a breathing space for renters, alongside which a Government that was serious about tackling the supply and affordability issues would put in place the types of policies that I and others have set out in great detail. Sinn Féin's alternative housing plan, A Home Of Your Own, is still our housing plan and I still speak about it on a regular basis. The Government continues to ignore or fails to implement the overwhelming majority of the Housing Commission's proposals.”
“What this misunderstands is that if it is not the right kind of supply in the right place at the right price, it does not meet people's housing needs. It is not that anybody on this side of the House is against private sector investment but there is a particular category of private sector investor who is only interested in high-price, high-yield, high-density developments in expensive parts of Dublin and, possibly although not guaranteed, in the docklands of Cork, where rents will be set at a level even higher than now and will never come down. This rental stock will have no impact on renters everywhere else. It is not just about supply. It is the right kind of supply in the right place at the right price.”
“What the Government should be doing in the first instance is preventing rent increases across the board for an emergency period. Renters simply cannot afford more rent increases. This is why amendment No. 1, and almost all of the other amendments I have in this group and others, seek to do several things. Amendment No. 1 seeks to amend the principal Act so that for a period of three years rents cannot be increased for all renters across the State. Meanwhile, all of the detailed, concrete proposals for addressing supply, which not only have I published but which I speak about on a regular basis, could be activated. The fundamental flaw in the core argument on the Government side is that this is all about supply.”
“With regard to existing rents, including those renters allegedly protected by the rent pressure zones, State-wide average rents were €1,440 and in Dublin they were €1,865. Last year, average rents for existing renters, 83% of whom are in rent pressure zones, rose by 4.6%. Some of this is because of the exemptions in the RPZs but I have no doubt that a large volume of it is because of non-compliance. Worse still, when daft.ie published its quarter 1 report for this year, so this is more up-to-date information, average new rents throughout the State were €2,023. In Dublin city the average rent was €2,470. Many of us who represent large urban constituencies know that a new rental coming on the market today costs €3,000 or €3,500. This is even in the suburbs I represent, such as Clondalkin and Lucan.”
“I do not say this to misrepresent or to scare. I say it because I understand the private rental sector, how it operates and how bad Government policy impacts on it. The only confusion that has been sown in recent weeks is on the Government side. This is not me saying this. I am sure the Minister or his advisers read all the Sunday newspapers That is the conclusion they reached and I agree with them. With respect to the amendments, the problem is that right now rents are simply too high for existing and new renters. Let us look at the figures. The figures in the Residential Tenancies Board report for quarter 4 last year showed new rents averaging out State-wide at €1,680 and in Dublin at €2,477. State-wide new rents were up 5.5% last year.”
“We still have a significant number of single property landlords availing of what was always their intention to cash in on their pension pot lump sum, which is entirely understandable when market prices were so high. The tenants of those properties will have to find somewhere else to live. That is the whole problem. The fact the average tenancy is less than four years means the churn in the 240,000 registered tenancies will have an impact that I am not even sure the Minister fully understands when the substantive proposals he will bring forward in the autumn come into force from 2026 onwards. The Minister is right that the minority of renters who have very long-term tenancy arrangements will get the protections he has outlined but the more than 80% of renters who are not in that position will be badly damaged by what the Minister is doing.”
“He has indeed welcomed some of the security-of-tenure provisions but he also says, in his article in the Irish Examiner today, that what the Minister is doing on rents, which is what we are here to discuss today, will not only wipe out those affordability gains but will actively undermine the Minister's security-of-tenure measures. I agree with him. Therefore, I have no difficulty whatsoever quoting him on the floor of the Dáil. I repeat that the Minister will wipe out all of the affordability gains that renters have secured. Why is this? It is because the majority of renters do not stay in their rental properties for more than six years. It is not simply a question of choosing to stay. Almost 5,000 notices of termination are issued quarterly.”
“Interestingly, Simon Coveney made many of the same charges then that the Minister is making now. He was proven wrong. He ran screaming from the Department of housing but renters were left with the consequences of his actions. We will return to the debate over how this operates in real time in the coming months. I want to speak specifically to the amendments. I am delighted the Minister referenced Dr. Michael Byrne from UCD because he is one of the most astute observers of the private rental sector. One of the central criticisms he has made in public and in writing of the Minister's proposals is that they would wipe out all of the affordability gains of the rent pressure zones since 2016. This is exactly what he has said.”
“I move amendment No. 1: In page 3, between lines 13 and 14, to insert the following: “Amendment of section 19 of Principal Act 2. Section 19(4)(b) of the Principal Act is amended, in the definition of “relevant percentage”— (a) in paragraph (a), by the substitution of “0 per cent” for “2 per cent”, and (b) by the deletion of paragraph (b).”. One of the great things about the truth is that it always comes out. Over the coming months and into next year, the impact of the changes the Minister is making, not just here but in the coming months, will be plain for everybody to see. We warned when the Minister's predecessor, Simon Coveney, introduced the rent pressure zones that they would lead to a two-tier rental market, exclude large numbers of renters and create widespread difficulties for many and we were proven right.”
“This Bill means higher rents with no guarantee of increased supply. What is clear today, after two weeks of chaos and confusion, is that Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael's housing policy has been exposed for the disaster that it is. The Minister's handling of this has been greatly damaged. That is why, in the context of the protest yesterday, the protest in Cork on Saturday and in the weeks ahead, thousands of people will march in opposition to what the Government is doing to renters. It is ripping them off and forcing them to pay higher rents. We will not stand for it.”
“What is in front of us will not protect renters because in a short matter of months, the Minister will bring forward legislation that will rip the heart out of the rent pressure zones. Over a period of time, many of the people the Government is promising protection today will eventually have their rents set to full market rent. All of the affordability gains of the near decade of rent pressure zones will be wiped away. That is what the Government is doing. It is part of a much bigger package, one that is an assault on renters at a time when the Government is also considering reducing design standards. Not only will renters be paying more rent, they will be living in smaller, darker and less adequate apartments in the future. The big consequence of Fianna Fáil's rent-hike Bill is that renters will be the losers once again.”
“The Minister also needs to clarify the impact of this legislation on people currently engaging in short-term letting, in many cases in rural countryside areas. This practice is valuable to the tourism economy. They understood that this matter was going to be dealt with by the process of the register legislation and the accompanying planning regulations from the Minister, Deputy Burke. The day after this Bill comes into effect, however, the short-term letting regulations introduced by the former Minister, Eoghan Murphy, will apply across the board. The Minister owes those people an explanation as to the implications of this and what his instructions to local authorities will be. To be clear, Sinn Féin is not opposing this Bill.”
“The Minister should go and talk to the journalists who raised these questions with his officials at the technical briefing. This was going to be in the legislation later this year. While the RPZs should have always applied to all renters back in 2016, no one should be facing rent increases right now. We need rent increases banned for an emergency period of three years for those renters paying the highest rents in the history of the State. The amendments I will table later, which we will push to a vote, would do exactly that. They would protect renters who are already paying rip-off rents from any form of rent increase at all. That is what a party which wants to protect renters should be doing, along with putting in place a credible plan to increase investment in the delivery of social, affordable and private for-purchase homes.”
“That will lead to more disputes at the Residential Tenancies Board, which cannot even handle the current level of cases it has. As a consequence, more problems will arise. To make matters worse, what landlord in possession of a vacant property between now and next March is going to re-let it? This will suck out those properties, which will constrain supply even further and make matters worse in the short term. With regard to the legislation, we have always argued that rent regulation should apply to all renters of all types in all counties. Extending the RPZs should have been done at the start. The Minister came into the Chamber and said that he is introducing this to protect renters when it was never even his intention to do so. It was always clear-----”
“I have heard the Minister and the Taoiseach say over and over again that they are going to protect all existing renters. Some 80% of current renters are in tenancies of six years or less. Long-term renters are in the minority. That is becoming increasingly evident through the constant levels of eviction notices. The idea that somehow existing renters are protected is simply not true. While there is no doubt the security of tenure changes will benefit a small number of renters, the Government is creating an even more complex set of arrangements that are more difficult to understand and more readily available for rogue landlords to exploit or semi-professional, accidental landlords to misunderstand and make mistakes.”
“In the best-case scenario, all this will do is create a modest increase in the levels of institutional investment in high-end, high-cost, private rental cost developments in the Google quarter, Sandyford and other high-income areas. Everyone else will be left behind. The industry reaction to this has ranged from the lukewarm to the hostile because the Government could not even get that bit right. The consequence is that renters everywhere will pay a cost. They will not get the supply dividend the Minister is alleging.”
“Worse than that, in respect of new rental stock, from the start of next year, the Government is going to peg annual rent reviews to inflation, which will drag overall new rents up even faster. Market rent resets for new tenants in first-time tenancies will accelerate at an even greater rate. This is being done on the promise of increased institutional investment in high-end, high-density, private rental sector investment. That investment will not be delivered in Cork, and certainly not in west Cork. It will not be delivered in the constituencies of the Minister or the Minister of State.”
“What is being done is not constructing a careful balance between landlords and tenants or introducing a comprehensive, State-wide rent protection regime. Rather, the rent pressure zone legislation introduced in 2016 is being dismantled over time. These were protections that were incredibly weak in the first place. Nobody will believe any attempt to present this as anything else. Universally, almost all the coverage, from journalists, commentators and industry, has accepted the simple, central fact of this proposal, which is that it is going to result in rent increases, in many cases at a more accelerated rate than would have otherwise happened. It appears that Fianna Fáil's solution to rising rents is to keep those rents rising.”
“He cannot even agree with his own party colleague, the Minister, Deputy James Lawless, on what level of additional protections may or may not be given to students. This shows that the Minister does not understand the legislation. He signed up to a package without any consideration of its impact on the vast majority of renters, leaving his backbenchers to defend what is utterly indefensible. Let us look at the package as a whole because today's Bill, which I will come to shortly, is only part of a wider package. Let us call it by its name. It is the Fianna Fáil rent hike Bill. This is Micheál Martin, who initiated this process and pulls the strings of his Minister, jacking up the rents for tens of thousands of hard-pressed renters from March 2026 onwards.”
“When the Minister launched the policy last Tuesday, it was clear from the words coming out of his mouth and in print in his press release that the ability of landlords to reset rents to the full market level would apply to all tenancies from March 2026. When he was exposed on the floor of the Dáil the Taoiseach was left reeling from the Minister's incompetence and only then did he change the plan. Likewise, there was no mention of students when he launched these proposals on 10 June. There was no mention from his officials during the technical briefing given to the media. Again, it was only when it was highlighted that students would be some of the first and worst hit that the Minister scrambled around to fix the issue.”
“With the greatest of respect to the Minister of State, Deputy Christopher O'Sullivan, speaking in defence of the hard-pressed renters in County Cork, the failure of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael since 2020 to do anything to protect the renters he represents has seen their rents increase by a staggering 60%. We are now looking at new rents in the Minister of State's county being €7,270 more expensive per year now than when the parties formed a coalition. I do not think renters in County Cork, especially outside the RPZs, will be thanking them for their inaction over all these years. As each day has unfolded since the leaks began the weekend before last, we have seen confusion, consternation, contradiction and widespread fear and anxiety among the tens of thousands of renters across this State.”