Report on Coalition plan to restrict social housing for migrants dismissed by campaigners
Campaigners have dismissed a report about a Government plan to clamp down on the provision of social housing to migrants, saying it is an attempt to solve a problem 'that does not exist'.
The Sunday Times
reported this weekend that the
Coalition
wants to limit access to social housing to people with strong and long-term connections to the Republic, with restrictions also coming in for emergency homeless accommodation.
Focus Ireland
director of advocacy and research Mike Allen said previous legislative forays into this area had been 'exposed as a poorly drafted response to a problem that does not exist'.
'Nobody believed that social housing should be allocated to people with no right to live in Ireland, but the Government was unable to give any evidence that it was happening and needed complex legislation to stop it,' he said.
READ MORE
Sunday's report outlined that after extensive legal advice, the Coalition was preparing to revisit proposals first made in a law early last year, but which were later dropped.
Citing plans due to go to Cabinet in the next fortnight, the report suggested Ministers would be told the law is needed to eliminate ambiguity over existing rules for non-Irish nationals who want to apply for social housing.
It said similar rules were planned for accessing emergency accommodation, with local authorities not required to assess households unless they are legally and habitually resident in the State.
Mr Allen said the proposals to restrict the capacity of local authorities to provide emergency shelter on a short-term humanitarian basis would result in more people being forced to sleep on the streets.
He said there will be 'inevitable consequences' for people's health and for public areas if such a condition were imposed.
The Opposition also criticised the proposals, with
Sinn Féin housing spokesman Eoin Ó Broin
calling it a 'deeply disingenuous and dangerous briefing'. He said it sought to shift blame for the housing and homelessness crises on to migrant communities.
The Dublin Mid-West TD said residency rules are already applied to social housing applications and when accessing emergency accommodation. He said his understanding was that the mooted Bill intends to put existing practice into primary legislation.
He accused Minister for Housing James Browne of 'wasting his officials' time drafting a Bill that is not needed'.
In a reply to a recent parliamentary question put down by Mr Ó Broin, Mr Browne outlined the conditions applied by local authorities when determining a 'local connection' as part of a social housing application.
These include having lived in the area for five years at any time, being employed in the area or within 15km of it, being in full-time education or receiving specialist medical care there, or having a relative living in the area for two years or longer.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Irish Times
29 minutes ago
- Irish Times
Third-level fees causing tension between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael
Good morning. The Taoiseach is swanking around the land of the rising sun. There's a heatwave in Europe . And at home there's a bit of a tension convention between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael over third level fees . The Fianna Fáil Minister for Higher Education James Lawless is in Fine Gael's bad books after suggesting that third level fees may rise by as much as €1,000 a year as the cost-of-living supports in recent budgets come to an end. Lawless has actually been talking about this for months – we reported on it back at the start of April – but as the budget maneuvering enters a more active phase, he returned to the subject in recent days. Third level fees of €3,000 a year have been reduced by €1000 by cost of living supports in recent years. Get rid of those supports – as the Government is pledged to do – and fees must go up, Lawless reasons. READ MORE But Fine Gael, ever attuned to many hardships faced by middle Ireland, is wondering out loud how you can fulfil the Programme for Government pledge to cut the cost of third level education by, er, increasing the cost of third level education. The situation was sufficiently grave to warrant a voice note from Tánaiste Simon Harris to Fine Gael TDs last night. 'The budget will be agreed by Government with key input from the party leaders. But it does need to help families with the cost of putting a young person through college,' Harris told his party. Expect this to be put to him when he takes leaders questions today. * Budget matters are also up for discussion when the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council (Ifac) visits the Budget Oversight Committee today, where Ifac chairman Seamus Coffey will tell the TDs and senators that the Government is on course for €2 billion of unbudgeted overspends this year – and that's just in current spending, not to mind ballooning capital projects. The finding is among a number of criticisms and warnings that Ifac is likely to make. The Government is currently preparing its summer economic statement, a key budgetary document that will indicate the parameters for spending increases in the October budget. The council will urge the Government not to continue with the pro-cyclical budgetary policies of recent years, which saw billions of euros in giveaways to voters announced on budget day, as well as longer term spending increases. 'Given the economy is in a strong position, it does not require support from budgetary policy. Standard economics suggests the government should support the economy when it is weak, but show restraint when the economy is strong,' Coffey is expected to tell the committee. Budgetary restraint, of course, in a time of plenty for the Exchequer, is a hard political sell. * The Cabinet meets this morning, sans Taoiseach, and the agenda features a number of housing related memos. As Harry McGee reports, the Government intends to establish a league table of how local authorities are performing when it comes to building social housing, which will be useful for blaming someone else. * Dublin has a new Lord Mayor . He is Ray McAdam, a Fine Gael councillor – the third FGer in a row to hold the position – and chum of the Minister for Finance, Paschal Donohoe. Best reads One of the largest estate agents in Ireland has launched an internal investigation after one of its staff allegedly offered to split the sale of a new build home in Newtownmountkennedy in order for it to qualify for the Help to Buy scheme. Niamh Towey has the story , and it's our lead this morning. A telecoms company with suspected ties to a key arm of the Iranian regime asked Irish diplomats for help setting up business deals in the Republic with Eir, Vodafone and Three , Jack Power reports. Fintan O'Toole finds that he has more wives than Henry VIII – thanks to AI. Playbook As mentioned above, Taoiseach Micheál Martin is in Japan for an official visit, with the agenda mostly dominated by trade and investment. China Correspondent Denis Staunton is covering the trip and has a preview here . Back at home, the Cabinet meets at Government Buildings this morning under the chairmanship of Simon Harris. Dáil business starts at 2pm with Leaders' Questions – Harris in the hot seat again – followed by the usual weekly row over the order of business. There's housing questions later, and a private members motion from Sinn Féin on the GPO and Moore St – which the party wants to see developed as a 1916 quarter. How long has this been going on now? Two Government Bills are due to conclude in the Seanad – the Supports for Survivors of Residential Institutional Abuse Bill and the Finance (Local Property Tax and Other Provisions) bill. At the committees, there's a few things to watch. The foreign affairs committee will begin pre-legislative scrutiny of the Occupied Territories Bill when senior officials from the Department of Foreign Affairs come in. The Committee on Defence and National Security is also doing pre-legislative scrutiny on the bill to abolish the triple lock, while the Budget Oversight Committee – as mentioned above – have the Fiscal Council in. Senior wallahs from the Department of Arts and Media are in to talk about the Arts Council and the controversy over its abandoned IT project. Full list of committee and details of the Dail and Seanad sittings are here .
Irish Times
2 hours ago
- Irish Times
If long-term renting is such a good solution, why don't more politicians do it?
The Government has opted to reject suggestions from various quarters, including some of its own , that it should establish a fund to allow Irish savers to finance the development of affordable housing for sale. Instead, it's going to entice international investors to do so. It will just be housing for rent, not sale, and it won't be affordable for most. Oblivious to the contradictory position of luring landlords while simultaneously persisting with the fantasy of being parties that support home ownership, Government policy is engineering a decline in people owning their own homes, and a commensurate rise in numbers renting. Hundreds of thousands of households will become poorer, and a small cohort of landlords will become a lot wealthier . Is this private rental sector into which more and more households are going to be corralled even fit for purpose? One issue is the fact that there is no deposit protection scheme in Ireland, despite the issue of deposits consistently being the second most common reason for disputes between landlords and tenants. These are schemes run in other countries by private companies or state agencies into which tenants pay their deposits, instead of handing them over to their landlord. The scheme then returns the deposit at the end of the tenancy, if all is well in the interim. Complaints of landlords not returning deposits to tenants drop significantly under such schemes. READ MORE There were 474 applications to the Residential Tenancies Board to resolve disputes about deposit retention in the first three months of 2025 alone. There has been a provision in Irish legislation for the establishment of such a scheme for a decade, but the section of the Residential Tenancies (Amendment) Act 2015 has never been commenced. Last February, People Before Profit TD Paul Murphy introduced a Bill to force the Government to establish the scheme. Nothing has happened since. There is also no definition of rent in Irish legislation to say what is included or not included under it. This lack of clarity facilitates large landlords in levying – according to recent media reports – up to an extra €200 per month for the use and upkeep of common areas. Common areas are places that tenants do not occupy exclusively and have no control over. In the US, large landlord Greystar (which is also present here) is facing a a class-action lawsuit after the Federal Trade Commission accused the company of imposing hidden 'junk' fees , which it denies. The FTC's lawsuit states that the fees 'make it impossible to actually rent from Greystar for the advertised prices'. It accuses the commission of over-reach. Such additional charges allows for circumvention of rent caps. Regardless of recent Government bluster about increasing security for tenants during the reform of Rent Pressure Zones, the fact remains that tenants of a 'small landlord' can face eviction for essentially spurious reasons such as the probably unprovable 'personal hardship ' of the landlord, or because a member of the landlord's family might need the property. The Government's strategy is that in order for rents for already financially stressed tenants to fall, rents for financially stressed tenants must first be allowed to rise Most renters in Ireland live a very legally precarious existence, regardless of how good their landlord is. Ireland is an outlier in this regard, compared to many countries with an established rental sector. Rent inflation in Ireland is 39 per cent higher than the European average , and housing costs in general are more than double this average when utility bills are factored in. Those hardest hit by affordability issues also include better-off renters. According to the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI), in 2023 'middle-to-higher-income renters in Ireland are more likely to face high housing costs than their European counterparts'. Fourteen per cent of the richest Irish renters pay more than 30 per cent of their income on rent, versus 3 per cent on average elsewhere. Sixteen per cent of the next-wealthiest renters pay more than 30 per cent of their income on rent compared to 9 per cent on average elsewhere. The Government's strategy is that in order for rents for already financially stressed tenants to fall, rents for financially stressed tenants must first be allowed to rise. High rents will then attract international investment, which will then build apartments for rent, which will then reduce rents across the board. Ignoring for a moment the significant pain that will be inflicted on all tenants while enacting this strategy of building housing that the majority of renters do not want , recent research from Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies found that the benefits of the construction of new apartments for rent does not find its way down to help those who need affordable rents. Given previous rent inflation, it is highly unlikely rents will fall here in any meaningful way, if at all. On the regulatory front, local authorities are charged with inspecting private rented sector accommodation to ensure it is safe and compliant with regulations. They each have a target to inspect 25 per cent of the private rented dwellings in their area. In 2023, just nine out of 31 local authorities hit that target (Meath achieved 45 per cent), and nine failed to meet it. Galway City Council managed to inspect less than 3 per cent of the private rented stock in its area. In 2023, 23 local authorities reported that more than 90 per cent of inspected dwellings were found to be non-compliant with the required standards. There are other concerns: tenancies being misrepresented as less secure licence agreements; landlords wilfully ignoring legal requirements including having to provide their names to tenants; and investigations that take years by an under-resourced RTB. The fact is that whether renting from the Government's white knights – international investors – or the traditional small landlord, there are serious issues with the private rented sector that need to be addressed before the State can legitimately expect people to willingly rent a home instead of owning one. The minuscule proportion of Government politicians who rent (in a country where one in five people in the population generally are in the private rental sector) tells its own story. If more politicians don't choose to rent long-term, why do they believe so many of us should? Dr Lorcan Sirr is senior lecturer in housing at the Technological University Dublin
Irish Times
2 hours ago
- Irish Times
Foreign affairs committee begins discussions on contentious Occupied Territories Bill
An Oireachtas committee will start discussing the Occupied Territories Bill on Tuesday, when senior officials from the Department of Foreign Affairs are questioned by TDs and Senators on a summary of the Bill published by the Government last week. The Bill begins pre-legislative scrutiny and will continue on Wednesday when Senator Frances Black , who originally proposed the legislation back in 2018, appears before the foreign affairs committee . Supporters of the Bill want it to be rushed through the Houses of the Oireachtas and passed into law before the summer break, but most sources acknowledge that is not feasible. Last week, the Government published the heads of the Bill – a section-by-section summary – of the Israeli Settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (Prohibition of Importation of Goods) Bill 2025, its version of the Occupied Territories Bill proposed by Senator Black. READ MORE It would ban the import of goods produced in the Israeli settlements, which are, according to International Court of Justice, illegally occupied Palestinian territories. 'Daddy' Trump meets Nato, while defence, trade and Gaza dominate EU summit Listen | 44:28 However, the Government's version does not include a ban on services, which it says is not possible under European law, though that is disputed by pro-Palestine campaigners. The foreign affairs officials are expected to be questioned on this point. It is expected that many committee members will seek to agree on a recommendation for the inclusion of services in the proposed legislation when the pre-legislative process is completed and a report compiled for the Government. The process will continue over the coming weeks as the committee hears from several groups and interested parties, though it is not clear if the Israeli government will be invited to make a submission to the committee. Israel withdrew its ambassador, Dana Erlich, from Dublin last year in protest at what it said was the anti-Israel stance of the Irish Government, something strongly disputed by Taoiseach Micheál Martin and Tánaiste Simon Harris. Allowing the Bill to begin its passage through the legislative process was specifically cited by the Israelis as part of the reason for closing their embassy here. 'We have been putting in place arrangements for extra sittings,' said Fianna Fáil TD John Lahart, who chairs the committee. 'We'll produce a report which will tee up the Dáil debate on the Bill.' There is some nervousness in Government about the possible consequences of passing the Bill, with the US government and business organisations underscoring their opposition to the measure. While the amount of trade between the State and the Occupied Territories is minuscule, the proposed legislation is seen – by supporters and opponents – as an important test case. Other European countries, frustrated with the lack of EU action against Israel on Gaza, have been asking the Irish Government about the legislation.
