Forty-first Amendment of the Constitution (Right to Housing) Bill 2026: Second Stage [Private Members]
Dail Éireann — 2026-10-01
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Richard Boyd Barrett (PBP), Dún Laoghaire

I thank Deputy Hearne for bringing forward this Bill, which we are very happy to support. It will be interesting to see because the indications are that the Government is not going to support it. Deputy Ó Broin had similar Bills in the previous Dáil. I had a Bill on the right to housing in 2021 that amazingly passed.
I think that was a mistake - the Government forgot to call a vote, so we got the right to housing referendum Bill passed. Of course, nothing was done about it and the housing situation has continued to get worse. The number of people in homeless and emergency accommodation has worsened steadily. At that stage when the Bill was passed, it was probably below 10,000 and since then, it has gone up to 17,000.
The number of people on housing lists - if you include everybody who is on a housing list, both those on the social housing list and those on HAP lists - is about the same; it is roughly 110,000 households. There are of course, and I will go into this in a second, people who do not even qualify for lists. The failure of the Government is spectacular and despite listing off all the things it says it is doing, the situation has continued to get worse.
I have one human example of why we need a right to housing. Caoimhe is now homeless for the second time, because of two subsequent evictions. She has three children and last Christmas, I read out a letter from one of her children who said in her letter to Santa that the only thing the child wanted was a home. They are still in emergency accommodation. It is ten months later and for the second time in their lives, they have been evicted through no fault of their own.
Caoimhe is a childcare worker and because the Government has not raised the social housing income thresholds - because, in my opinion, it wants to deny people eligibility for social housing - she is homeless. However, she has now been taken off the housing list because as a childcare worker, she has gone over the eligibility limit. For a single person, that is now €43,930 and she earns €44, 272. Here is someone, to use Government phraseology, who gets up early in the morning and has three children to look after who are writing to Santa saying they just want a home and who are now homeless for a second time through no fault of their own. They were evicted because the Government allows landlords to evict families like hers. She is now trapped as not only can she not get social housing, she is not eligible for HAP either.
It is this crazy situation where if you are in a HAP tenancy, it does not matter if your earnings go up. If she had been in a social house which she should be in - if the Government had not failed her - it would not have made any difference if her income went up, she would just pay a higher rent. However, she is now homeless and in the worst possible position. She is eligible for nothing because her pay has gone over the housing limit that the Government will not raise, despite us appealing to it for the past two years. People are being knocked off the lists all the time and are being punished for working and getting up early in the morning. There is also of course, the hopelessness of those who are actually on the lists, particularly families. Much of the social housing the Government boasts about delivering is outsourced to the private sector, which does not want to build family homes. They can get more one- and two-bedroom units on a site than building three- or four-bedroom units.
That is why family homelessness in particular has gone up. The Government is relying on people who want to make money from every site rather than deliver for the housing need. This is something that has been pointed out repeatedly to the Government but it continues to outsource it. Even worse, it then sells off public land. It grieves me every single time I go out the N11 to pass by the RTÉ campus and I look at the most profitable house builder in the country now building 500 apartments on part of the old campus. Why is a private builder whose profits last year rose to €168 million and which are increasing every year, going to profit from and decide what proportion of the houses on what was public land will be three or two bedrooms? Of course, a very small proportion will be three bedrooms and there will be no four bedrooms for the bigger families that need them, because it is not profitable. The Government gave this builder the site. The State allowed that to happen, instead of the LDA taking it.
In Cherrywood in my area, which has the biggest residential development in the country, DLR Properties is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council but the elected councillors have no control over what it does with the property. However, there are Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael councillors on the board - not anybody on the Left of course - who have decided to sell it. They have decided o sell public land, which could deliver 1,200 houses in order that some other profiteer can make money, can decide whether there will be any family housing and that will get all the profits made from the land. The Government is now rezoning land everywhere, instantly increasing its value, which is all in private hands, so that more people can profit from the housing misery of people like Caoimhe.
A right to housing would be helpful in this regard. If there was a constitutional right, there would be legal backing and an imperative to ensure people like Caoimhe were not made homeless. There would be a prioritisation of State resources to provide housing for people like Caoimhe, and most importantly, for her children. By the way, Caoimhe is from Ballybrack-Loughlinstown. Andy is another person who is 25 and who is now being threatened with eviction from the council house he has lived in all his life. His mother died recently and while it is tragic enough to lose your parent, as a consequence of the technicality of him not being the primary tenant even though he has never lived anywhere else, he is now being told to get out and is not being offered anywhere else. That is unbelievable. Why, against a background of record levels of homelessness, would the State allow someone to be thrown out? He will then be down in emergency accommodation. Why would the Government do that? This is the sort of madness we have because we do not have a right to housing.
I have to be honest. We need to start getting radical over this. We need to start doing what they do in Spain, because the young and older people - an 87-year-old woman was evicted - are out on the streets saying, "We have had enough of this shit." I have been arguing this stuff for a long time, as have other people in this House, and to be honest, we need to get angry and do something about it because these sorts of situations are unacceptable. You can multiply those cases by thousands. People are trapped in this situation where they have done nothing wrong, and there are people profiteering from it. Cairn Homes and Glenveagh Homes have their profits going up. The O'Flynn and Ballymore Groups and so on do not even publish their profits but we know they have gone up. IRES REIT profits have also gone up.
People are profiteering off this stuff. They are hoarding land, speculating, charging record house prices and rents and ordinary working people are being left in these dire circumstances. The majority of young people are now saying they are going to leave the country because they do not think they will ever afford to live here but not to worry, the lads are making profits so it does not matter. That is why the Government will not do it, because it will infringe on the profits of these people. It is worried we might actually control prices and rents and that we might take the land bank back off them. What got Die Linke, the left-wing party in Berlin, elected was proposing to expropriate the landlords. That is what the Government is worried about. It is worried that the right to housing might lead to that but it is what needs to happen. By the way, this was more or less said back in the early 1970s in the Kenny report, that is, taking the zoned land bank off these people to deliver housing for need. That is what needs to happen.
There are greedy speculators controlling the price of land, the available property and what is built. The consequence is housing misery and a housing crisis that just goes on and on. We have to stop this for the sake of Caoimhe and her children, for Andy and for people like them. Even if the Minister is not going to do that, will he raise the thresholds and start telling local authorities to not make people homeless? Will Government stop selling off public land to people who are just profiteering?
I thank Deputy Hearne but to be honest, we need to be out on the streets in the way they are in Spain and Germany, as well as putting Bills forward in here.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-10-01/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-10-05T01:01:00+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-10-01