The Dáil has agreed to pass a piece of legislation without a vote which will extend Rent Pressure Zones across the country.
The bill will go to the Seanad tomorrow and it is expected to be signed into law by President Michael D Higgins on Friday.
The Government rejected amendments to the bill which were tabled by Sinn Féin and Labour.
The legislation will mean that all current renters will be covered by a 2% annual rent hike cap once the bill is signed by the President.
Wider changes to the rent rules will be introduced next March and this will require further legislation to be passed in autumn.
Opposition parties have stated that they will not support these more extensive rent reforms which will allow landlords to reset rents to market rates every six years.
Minister for Housing James Browne has said that renters will get greater security of tenure as part of the changes.
Sinn Féin’s Spokesperson on Housing Eoin Ó Broin earlier described the legislation as “an utter shambles” and “utterly defensible”.
He told the Dáil that he has never witnessed such a “haphazard, ramshackle, back of the envelope” approach to a crucial policy, adding that it is a “farce”.
Minister of State at the Department of Housing Christopher O’Sullivan, who introduced the bill, said that the Government was moving fast because tenants need protection and this will be delivered by extending RPZs.
“This is an immediate and concrete protection against high rent inflation,” he added, claiming that it would create certainty, stability and clarity for the sector.
Mr O’Sullivan added that “this will come as a great sigh of relief” to many of his constituents in Cork South-West.
However, Mr Ó Broin described the Government move as an “assault on renters” who “will be the losers”.
Ministers, he added, “scrambled around” to add references to students to the bill after failing to mention them in any advance briefing.
“It is the Fianna Fáil rent hike bill,” the deputy said, adding that the party’s solution to rising rents “is to keep those rents rising”.
Mr Ó Broin also said that the move amounts to the dismantling of Rent Pressure Zones and “rips the heart out of the RPZs”.
He claimed that “in the best case scenario” the proposals will create a modest increase of (housing) supply in high-value areas “and everybody else will be left behind”.
Security of tenure changes will benefit a small group of tenants, Mr Ó Broin conceded, but said they will create more complicated and difficult rules that can be exploited by rogue landlords and will lead accidental landlords to make mistakes.
All this will add to the workload of the already overloaded Residential Tenacies Board (RTB), he said.
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Mr O’Sullivan defended the bill, claiming the Government is aiming to strike a balance in its approach.
“We aim to attract investment, but we know that tenants deserve and need fair treatment,” he said.
The minister noted that a larger landlord – with four or more tenancies – cannot end a tenancy created on or after March 2026 via a no-fault eviction.
“No-fault evictions will be restricted to smaller landlords and outlawed for larger landlords,” Mr O’Sullivan said.
The minister added that rent resetting would be allowed only in specific circumstances.
“This will come as a great sigh of relief” to many of his constituents in Cork South-West, the minister added.
Minister of State John Cummins said that 17% of tenancies are outside RPZs.
He emphasised the role of enforcement and noted that the RTB has launched “several in-depth investigations into serious, deliberate and repeated breaches of rental law”.
The board investigated 16,052 tenancies for excessive rent hikes and €70,911 was returned to tenants following 114 compliance interventions, he added.
Connolly accuses Govt of normalising homelessness
“We have turned language on its head”, Independent TD Catherine Connolly said of the Government’s claim to protect renters, when the reailty is that it is normalising insecurity and homelessness.
“We are in serious trouble as a republic. More and more in Ireland, there’s a lack of faith in anything the Government says,” she told the Dáil.
“We stopped building [houses] in 2009,” Ms Connolly said, adding that the housing crisis is a consequence of repeated decisions made by successive governments which treated housing as a product and simply backed the market.
She said that her office is struggling to manage the level of housing problems that constituents are presenting with.
