I move: "That the Bill be read a Second Time."
I thank the Minister of State for attending. Unlike the Topical Issue debate, we have the right Minister, as such, for this Bill. There is no better Minister for it from the Department. I know he shares a lot of the same concerns as I have on this. I wish to state at the outset my firm view, and that of the Social Democrats, which I have articulated for a long time, that nobody who pays their rent should be at risk of eviction or homelessness, as is the case in most other European countries. What we need overall is a ban on no-fault evictions, as is the norm in most European countries. I believe that as a country we will get there eventually, but the sooner we get there, the fewer difficulties there are going to be for renters.
The Bill is a measure that would only address this situation for the smallest of cohorts of renters, effectively. It is a much more limited measure than the overall reform that we believe is needed in the rental sector, but it is an important measure all the same. I welcome the confirmation from the Taoiseach to me yesterday in the Dáil that the Government will be supporting the Bill going to Committee Stage. The Minister, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, also spoke with me yesterday about it. I welcome that support for it.
The aim of the Bill is to fix the Tyrrelstown amendment and to put an end to situations of mass evictions, where multiple households can be evicted at the same time simply because the owner of the building or a number of rental properties is seeking to sell. I will listen very keenly to what the Minister of State has to say in response to the Bill. I am very interested in the detailed response that will be given. I am prepared to work very constructively to try to address any concerns the Minister of State and the Department have, and I will certainly be engaging with them to see what we can do to address them. I will be pushing to have time allocated for this in the Oireachtas housing committee to enable it to progress as quickly as possible.
By way of background, the Tyrrelstown amendment came about after the events in Tyrrelstown in west Dublin.
The eviction notices were issued after the original landlord loans were bought by the Wall Street giant, Goldman Sachs. Some of the tenants had lived in their own homes for eight years and had paid in the region of €120,000 in rent at that time. Residents successfully challenged the eviction notice to the Residential Tenancies Board and this resulted in the Tyrrelstown amendment, a legal move to block landlords trying to sell up entire estates or groups of apartments and homes to ensure vacant possession.
One of the fundamental changes brought about by the Planning and Development (Housing) and Residential Tenancies Act 2016 was the introduction of the Tyrrelstown amendment which aimed to prevent these situations where large numbers of residents in single developments are served with termination notices simultaneously by a landlord in order to sell the entire development with vacant possession. The amendment was supposed to ensure that where a landlord intends to sell ten or more units within a single multi-unit development, that sale would be subject to the existing tenants remaining in place. There was an exception to this new rule where the market value of the property sold with the tenant in situ was 20% below the price that could be obtained for the property with vacant possession and the application of the rule would be unduly onerous and cause hardship to the landlord. That was the wording. Unfortunately, the amendment did not provide any guidance on what would be considered unduly onerous or hardship to a landlord, which are quite vague terms. They certainly have been used by some landlords to go ahead with mass evictions.
The Tenancy Protection Bill we are discussing seeks to remove these exemptions so renters are properly protected from mass evictions. How this exemption has been used is not what I believe was intended by legislators at the time. All of us who engage with landlords and renters in our constituencies will be aware there can be a huge amount of hardship for renters. When there are individual landlords who own one property or a small number of properties, there are instances where individual landlords can indeed be in hardship. They may be reliant on the rental income and, particularly now with increased interest rates, they may be falling behind in payments. While in many cases it is renters who are in difficulty, there are situations where individual landlords are in difficulties as well. I absolutely recognise that.
However, it is hard to extend that consideration to those who own multiple properties, ten or more. It is hard to equate a landlord who owns that many properties with the hardship of an individual renter who is getting an eviction notice, who has always paid their rent, and who could be going into homelessness. Of course, when a new buyer buys those homes and continues to rent them out, there is no reason the original tenants should not stay in place.
There was good discussion of vacant possession at the Oireachtas housing committee yesterday when representatives of Threshold, IPAV and the Irish Property Owners Association appeared before the committee. What came through very strongly from their contributions was how inefficient achieving vacant possession is. There is a huge human cost for renters. It is very destructive and stressful. In the worst-case scenario, it leads to people becoming homeless, even without the destruction to kids potentially being uprooted out of the community away from their friends, having to go to new schools and all those different things. There are inefficiencies even from a landlord's point of view of having several months where they are not getting any rental income, the vacancy in the housing stock is unnecessary, and the cost then potentially of a new landlord reletting and so forth.
In most European countries that kind of vacant possession is not achieved when a landlord is selling a property. What happens is that the renter stays in place, a new landlord now owns the property, the renter changes the bank account they are paying into and life goes on in most cases. I absolutely accept there would need to be exceptions for people renting out their principal primary residence, for example. They would obviously need to have different arrangements. In the larger context, we need to address the issue of vacant possession. If we were to get to the European norm, we would be in a much better place for renters and for the efficient use of the housing stock. Switzerland, where 52% of households are renters, is the country with the largest rental sector. There, people who pay their rent do not get evicted and a Bill like this would not be needed. In Germany, 48% of households rent and renters cannot be evicted on the grounds of selling. This Bill does not address that larger problem. It only looks at the Tyrrelstown amendment and those multiple households.
I will give an example where the loopholes with the Tyrrelstown amendment are causing genuine problems. There have been multiple cases where something similar has happened. In Tathony House in October 2022, nearly 100 people were given eviction notices when the landlord claimed that a sale with tenants in situ would cause more than a 20% drop in value and that this situation would cause undue hardship to the landlord. Dublin City Council contacted the owner of Tathony House five times since the start of the year to query his plans for the building but did not actually receive a response. The residents took a case to the Residential Tenancies Board where the landlord claimed the sale would garner €6 million while the sale with tenants in situ would only get €4 million and this would cause the landlord unto hardship. This was appealed and the Residential Tenancies Board found in favour of the renters.
The landlord who claimed hardship made €3.7 million in leasing the property to the State between 2003 and 2007 alone, not to mention the rental income collected since. The landlord appealed the decision of the RTB and then dropped the case last month just before the tribunal hearing took place. In that time, with all of the stress and hassle caused by these eviction notices playing out, 29 out of 34 households at that point had given up their tendencies. That meant the landlord was then free to issue fresh eviction notices to the five remaining households which were no longer protected by the Tyrrelstown amendment. This is not a once-off occurrence and it is happening in multiple situations. It highlights how these exemptions can be used by landlords to wear down the tenants and effectively bypass the protections that were intended with the Tyrrelstown amendment. With the threat of pending eviction, they get the number of tenants below ten and they are able to go about their business as usual and carry out evictions. I pay tribute to the residents of Tathony House who have been campaigning on this. I know it is hugely stressful and difficult for them.
The purpose of the Bill is to protect renters from mass evictions, which was the original intent of the Tyrrelstown amendment. The current protections are clearly not fit for purpose which has been highlighted by the ongoing situation in Tathony House and in other locations. The Tyrrelstown amendment is supposed to protect renters from mass evictions. The multiple exemptions ensure it has not worked in many instances. Although the amendment states that ten or more households cannot be evicted at once, landlords can avoid this rule by claiming that selling the homes with tenants in situ would cause them undue hardship. Simply in terms of proportionality, I have to question what kind of hardship can be solved when compared with the hardship of renters facing those kinds of evictions.
We do not know what will happen in Tathony House. In other locations where this has happened, this has been used to get vacant possession of apartment blocks. People who have been renting for a number of years and have paid a massive amount in rent have all moved out of their homes and then the new owner starts renting them out at massively inflated rents. This is massively destructive to people and is a cost to the State and local authorities in terms of support services, trying to prevent people going into homelessness and then supporting households who become homeless.
This Tenancy Protection Bill would end mass evictions once and for all by scrapping these evictions. I very much look forward to hearing what the Minister of State has to say and I will work constructively with him and the Department to try to get this fixed. While I have a strong view, this is a small aspect. We should not be in a situation of having to consider this. We should take the bold steps to move towards a European-style situation. There could be exemptions where the principal private residence is being rented out by somebody who is going away for a year or two years for work, education or other reasons. That is a different scenario and a discussion for another day.
