Forty-first Amendment of the Constitution (Right to Housing) Bill 2026: Second Stage [Private Members]
Dail Éireann — 2026-10-01
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Sinéad Gibney (SD), Dublin Rathdown

I thank the Minister for being here for the debate and for attending for as long as he did. I thank Deputy Hearne for bringing forward the Bill. We are proud to put it forward as a party and of all the work Deputy Hearne put into it. The first thing I want to speak to is the constitutional element of this because for me the Constitution is where law meets the population.
The Constitution should reflect the values of the population. It is not just an instrument of law. It is an expression of who we are as a society, where we are as a society and where our priorities are as a society. For me, the idea that we do not have housing enshrined in our Constitution as a fundamental right is a problem because we can see all around us on a daily basis in our constituency offices and among all of the different groups we work with that this is a crisis and an emergency.
I want to speak to some of the fundamentals of that crisis. Essentially, every generation that is younger than me has been locked out of home ownership. We are seeing spiralling figures of homelessness, with 5,830 children now in homelessness and 17,885 people in total. Some of those children are experiencing multiple years in homelessness. If we ever want to see a dictionary definition of storing up problems, then it is child homelessness. Those children will grow up having experienced the difficulties sown in these fundamental years that they are experiencing as children, and we as a society will be paying for this crisis for generations to come.
The reality of the Minister's speech is a million miles away. That for me is one of the biggest issues when we come to debate these topics. The phrases that are in there - "the largest number of new build social homes", "the highest annual total recorded" of starter homes supports, "These figures demonstrate the impact", "They represent serious momentum", "They reflect the scaling up", "While 2025 was a record year, we are driving on", "We are making home ownership more accessible", and "I am confident that this trajectory will continue throughout 2026" - do not match with what we can all see clearly with our eyes, which is that this is a housing emergency that has dominated our society for decades now and is affecting every single person in our country. It is not only about the people who are locked out of home ownership in the generations younger than I am. It is about their families who have to support them, it is the many houses that I knock on in my constituency where 30-year-old and 40-year-old people are living in their box rooms still, now seeking the best they can look forward to, which might be a bed in a shed. This is what we are dealing with. This reality that is being put forward by the Minister just does not tally.
The Minister commented that this Bill was a distraction. Saying that to progress a right to housing being enshrined in the Constitution is a distraction is just so disingenuous. Honestly, not to gender stereotype, but can we not multitask in the Government? Can we not pursue the right to housing while we address the supply issue?
That brings me to the other matter, which is that the Minister says this will not resolve the issue. We know it will not. We understand the complexity and do not need to be talked down to on that. All of the other bodies that have backed this know that too. What it will do is force a better response from the Government and from the State, including all of the arms of the State that need to be involved in our response to the housing emergency that we are all living through. It will better balance the emphasis that the Government places on the private sector solutions. When we say this, we get thrown right back at us that we do not see or recognise that the private sector has a role to play. That is not true. We absolutely see that there is a role for the private sector to play, but what we have is a better balance between what the private sector can do and what the State must do. What this Bill and the enshrined recognition in our Constitution of a right to housing would do is support the Minister and local authorities in developing that policy. All of the arms of the State would be better equipped if we had that recognised right to housing.
In the remaining half of my time, I would like to talk about what this can do. The right to housing, as something enshrined in our Constitution, would be an expression of our values. It would be a statement of values that we can all look to. My colleague Deputy Hearne spoke about the fact that people talked about the right to education. They talk about it here in the House, but they also talk in society about how we have the right to an appropriate education for our children and that that right needs to be realised. I am not saying it is realised in every way, but it nonetheless is something that people can get their heads around and can actually be something in respect of which there is a common understanding that it is a right.
The other thing about housing as a fundamental right - I am speaking now about my own experience in this area in the rights and equality space - is that it is a fundamental right. This means that without the right to housing, it is virtually impossible to realise the other rights that we all should enjoy in society such as the right to employment, the right to privacy and the right to health. These are all compromised when people cannot find appropriate shelter to live in. That is why it is a fundamental right and that is why it deserves to be introduced into our Constitution.
Another concept I want to speak to today is adequate housing. When I was working in my previous organisation, the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission, we did a lot of work on this to try to create a legal benchmark of what adequate housing was and what we meant when we talked about adequate housing. The work we commissioned on that defined adequate housing as having: security of tenure; affordability; habitability, that is, quality housing you can actually live in; availability of services, given that there is no point in having a house if you do not have access to water and sanitation; accessibility for those people who need particular design or logistical features in their homes; location so that you can do the things you want to do such as go to school, go to work and take part in community activities; and cultural adequacy.
That last one is interesting because it brings me to my next point, which is really the reason that I do not think the Government is interested in this. It is the people who are most at risk who would actually be assisted by the right to housing being enshrined in our Constitution. For example, we heard from a spokesperson of the Before We Die campaign at a briefing today. I do not think I saw any Government representatives attending the briefing. We heard from experts from legal groups, disability groups and so on. The Before We Die spokesperson spoke about how his daughter would simply be seen as a commodity once her parents died. They are scrambling hard at the moment, but once they die, she does not have a right to housing. She will probably be removed from the location she is in. When her parents die, she will lose her home and probably be shifted to somewhere else in the country, meaning that she also cannot access the services, community and activities that she currently enjoys as an adult with an intellectual disability.
We are also talking about lone parents who, like the case Deputy Boyd Barrett mentioned, are already existing in a Byzantine reality of supports from the State. They are pushed out of housing lists and pushed out of this and that because they adjust their circumstances ever so slightly. I raised my daughter alone and I know a lot about how lone parents are challenged in this society. While I was lucky enough to come from a background that meant my housing was never compromised, I did have to move back into my own family home. I slept in my old bed in my old bedroom with my daughter for the first four years of her life before I was able to move into an annexe at my family home and eventually be able to afford to move when my daughter was nine years old. For lone parents trying to manage all of this in the middle of a housing crisis, this is what they are looking at. These are the people who experience discrimination most but who are so under pressure that they cannot pursue the discrimination through the legal access to justice they are owed. If a person is denied a housing assistant payment, HAP, application or a rental application essentially because they are a single parent, even though that might not be explicitly said, they are not going to go to the Workplace Relations Commission, WRC, and lodge a case. They just have to put a roof over their child's head. Migrants are most likely to live in inadequate housing in terms of overcrowding and actual availability of services and standards. These are the groups that are going to be helped most by the recognition of housing as a right. The Minister of State's party supported it - that is the most heartbreaking part of it - but like neutrality, it seems to have left that in the dust and joined with its Fine Gael colleagues to say it is going to go with this ideology instead now. I ask the Minister of State to please support this and make it easier for his own Minister for housing to actually provide a right to housing in our Constitution.

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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