An emergency law to extend Rent Pressure Zones (RPZs) to the entire country could be in place by Friday if the President signs the legislation immediately after the Oireachtas passes it, the Dáil has heard.
Minister of State for Housing Christopher O’Sullivan said the Residential Tenancies (Amendment) Bill is an “immediate and concrete protection against high rent inflation”.
The controversial legislation is being rushed through both Houses replacing scheduled proceedings as an interim measure to “quickly protect all tenants from high rent increases”.
The Opposition supported the legislation, despite intense criticism of the Government’s “ramshackle, haphazard” and “back-of-the-envelope” reform proposals.
The legislation was passed in the Dáil on Wednesday and goes to the Seanad on Thursday. Mr O’Sullivan said that “from the day after the passing of this Bill” with “enactment by President Higgins” no rent increase across the country can exceed 2 per cent or the rate of inflation, whichever is lower, with certain exceptions.
“This is an immediate and concrete protection against high rent inflation,” he said.
“We want to provide certainty, clarity and stability for the rental sector,” he said. The new policy measures announced last week to apply from next March aim to boost investment in the supply of homes.
Legislation will be introduced later this year to give effect to reforms announced last week which will apply from March 2026 when rents for new tenancies can be set at market value.
Opposition smells blood in the water over RPZ changes
But Sinn Féin housing spokesman Eoin Ó Broin described the Government’s proposals as an “utter shambles” and “an assault on renters” who will be the losers. He hit out at the “haphazard, ramshackle, back-of-the-envelope process” for widespread reforms that will affect “tens of thousands of people”.
Mr Ó Broin said that “in the best-case scenario” there will only be “a modest increase in the levels of institutional investment in high-end, high-cost, private rental cost developments”.
“The consequence of this is that renters everywhere will pay a cost,” because “80 per cent of current renters are in tenancies of six months or less” and “the idea that somehow existing renters are protected is simply not true”.
Labour spokesman Conor Sheehan who called for a two-year rent freeze, said the Government’s measures “will, in the round, cause rents to increase again”.
The proposals last week “very nearly caused a run on the rental market”. He added it is “very clear what the priority is here because investors will not be negatively impacted by these changes but renters will”.
Under the proposals “we will return to a situation in this country whereby people will be evicted from their properties because they cannot pay the rent”.
Social Democrats spokesman Rory Hearne said it is “quite a cruel move” to give renters the RPZ for six or seven months “and then rip it away from them”, next March.
When their tenancy ends or the landlord decides to sell the property in six years’ time “they will face market rents and a rental system and a housing market that will be even more unaffordable”.
He said “the Government is taking a gamble, but it is gambling with renters’ lives, betting on the likelihood that the free market and the investor funds will come through for renters”.
Green Party leader Roderic O’Gorman called on the Minister to tie rent caps to the property and not just to the lease. In this way “students returning to the same room are not charged new market rent each year”.
There should be a legal definition for student tenancy “allowing academic year leases to be regulated in line with their unique situation”.
These are not “radical asks” but “practical adjustments that would make this legislation better”.
