Forty-first Amendment of the Constitution (Right to Housing) Bill 2026: Second Stage [Private Members] Dail Éireann — 2026-10-01 ============================================================ Conor Sheehan (LAB), Limerick City I am here to speak in support of this Bill. At the outset in his speech, the Minister mentioned Spain and the housing crisis that is raging across Spain at the moment. It is important to note for context that there is such a terrible housing crisis in Spain because when Spain transitioned from Francoism to democracy, the social housing stock in Spain was between 1% and about 3%. There was a Francoist system of housing which transitioned into democracy. There were the 1990s and 2000s, an awful lot of property speculation and a property boom. Even though this constitutional right to housing, which I support, is not a silver bullet, it is certainly not worsening the situation in Spain. I cannot understand why Government is opposing this Bill because it grabs the text from the Housing Commission report and it goes more to my constant refrain and criticism of Government treating the Housing Commission report almost like a buffet from which you can pick bits and bobs while ignoring other parts of it. It is important to note that because the Minister's predecessor did not even launch the Housing Commission report. There was no proper launch. He did not want it to get the level of traction that it got because it sets out starkly in many ways how the State is going wrong. I also support this Bill because I believe a constitutional right to housing would make the Minister's job easier. It is plain for those of us in opposition to see that many of the issues in relation to housing, particularly the delivery of public housing, come with how the Minister's Department interacts with the Department of public expenditure. It is clear that the tenant in situ cuts that were carried out last year, the changes to that scheme and the narrowing of the focus were as a result of the Department of public expenditure essentially coming in with big scissors. The problem is that in our Constitution we have a right to private property. We do not have an explicit right to housing. Therefore, it is almost, ipso facto , by way of our basic law, that housing is essentially treated as a commodity and not as a public good. Different Oireachtas housing committees have looked at this over the years. They have heard from many expert witnesses, most of whom who have drawn the same conclusion. This is not a silver bullet but it is about rebalancing the scales and putting a constitutional duty on the State to ensure that every citizen has access to secure, affordable and dignified accommodation. It is a rebalance away from treating housing as a commodity towards treating housing as a common and public good. Looking at how we have delivered housing over the best part of three or four decades, it is very clear from the pickle we find ourselves in at the moment that it is not working. It is not working because we have 18,000 people homeless. It is not working because rents and house prices are so high. Even though the Minister constantly talks about the need to deliver more supply, while we do need to deliver more supply, the supply that is being incentivised at the moment, certainly in Dublin and Cork and the major cities, is not affordable. It is high-end luxury, build-to-rent apartments, at €2,000 or €3,000 a month to rent. This Bill would ensure that if we had a constitutional right to housing, there would be a situation where if an individual or a family entered homelessness or was at risk of entering homelessness, their right to safe and secure shelter would be the primary policy consideration. I cannot understand why the Minister is outright opposing it. I do not understand why he talks about the Housing Commission and post-2030 in his speech, and why Government could not even have considered a timed amendment on this, for us to maybe come back to it at some point in the not-too-distant future. As was mentioned by other speakers, the Minister's own colleague, Senator Mary Fitzpatrick, introduced a Private Members' motion in the Seanad in 2021, seeking to amend Article 43 of the Constitution. We are at a stage now where the time for tinkering around the edges of a system that is fundamentally broken is over. Many of the societal problems, not just here but in other countries around the so-called western world, which we have at the moment are caused by decades of neoliberalism and a vision of a Thatcherite or a Reaganite state in how public services and housing are delivered. It is not working. We need proper State accountability. We need to see the right to housing inserted into the Constitution because it affects other things. For example, the Kenny report has been sitting on a shelf somewhere gathering mould since the 1970s. We have huge issues with land speculation in this country. It is one of the primary drivers of our housing crisis. The access to adequate, secure and affordable shelter should be explicitly recognised as a fundamental human right. I support this because we need to rebalance and re-tilt the scales. We need to legally obligate the State to prioritise public housing above and beyond all other forms of housing and to actually tackle homelessness. I am disappointed because the Bill is so narrow and so specific. It uses the wording the Housing Commission spent the bones of two years deliberating over but the Minister has come in and delivered a speech prepared by his Department that we have all heard many times before. He constantly says the State is building record amounts of social housing but the housing deficit continues to grow year on year. It is going to be at around 300,000. This crisis and the numbers entering homelessness are unfortunately continuing to rise. That is why I really believe this Bill, as something that is genuinely radical, merits a more serious treatment than it is getting here tonight. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. 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