Residential Tenancies Bill passed by government in Dáil

Perhaps the most irritating contribution to the five hour debate on the Residential Tenancies Bill was that from the Taoiseach. He offered the following gem in response to a point made by Holly Cairns that rents ‘reset’ to ‘market rates’ would see increases up to €3,000 per month for people, taken from their after tax income.

Ms Cairns said this increase would lead to critical public service workers being priced out, while young people will leave the country.

“Why would young people in their 20s and 30s stay here just to hand over all of their income to a landlord? What sort of life is that?” she asked.

Ms Cairns said more children will also become homeless as a result.

Ms Cairns said more children will also become homeless as a result.

She said the Social Democrats would alternatively set up a State-construction company and acquire four modular home factories, as well as a new State-savings scheme to build homes.

The Taoiseach said he fundamentally did not agree with Ms Cairns assertions.

He said the Housing Commission, the Housing Agency, the ERSI and most economists recommend that the Rent Pressure Zones system needed to be reformed, and this is what the Government is doing.

“The fundamental difference between Government and Opposition is we want to sort out the housing issue, we want to deal with it,” he told the Dáil.

The Opposition does not want to sort out the housing issue, does not want to deal with it? Even by his standards that’s quite something to say.

The problem, though, is that he, unlike the Opposition, has had multiple opportunities to do so since at least 2016 – given the supply and confidence arrangement that FF afforded Fine Gael and then subsequently as a coalition partner in not one, but now two governments with that party. That’s, what, a decade.

And the issue is ‘sorted’? Is it ‘dealt’ with?

Note too that he slides to a certain rhetoric, this around the broader ‘housing’ issue on foot of Cairns point. He knows well that the situation of tenants is a very specific aspect of that issue, in fact a separate but related issue – or perhaps he doesn’t or he’s not much pushed by it. Five hours on a Residential Tenancies Bill and the best answer he can give is that he knows best – despite there being multiple contributions from others to the contrary.

The result of that was 80 votes in favour and 70 votes against.

The Ceann Comhairle then declared the bill passed.

In the course of a five-hour debate this evening, only nine of 69 amendments that had been put forward by opposition parties were discussed.

None were accepted by the Government during a number of votes that took place.

The bill goes to the Seanad tomorrow.

Meanwhile this news, again not unrelated:

There were no properties available to rent within standard Housing Assistance Payment (HAP) limits across the 16 areas surveyed for the latest Simon Communities Locked Out of the Market report.

Just 31 properties were available within any HAP limits, all of which were within the higher discretionary rates, which represents only 3% of all properties available to rent at the time of the study.

The charity has said it highlights the continued difficulty for households relying on HAP to access the private rental market.

HAP recipients must find their own accommodation within the private rental market.

Over three days in December, 929 properties were available to rent at any price across the 16 study areas surveyed.

While this represented a 12% increase compared with September 2025, it marks a 25% reduction compared with December 2024.

And a possible solution:

Simon Communities of Ireland Executive Director Ber Grogan  said that one of the levers available to the Government is the enforcement of regulations around short-term lets.

“This could potentially bring thousands of properties back into the market at a time when there is a dire shortage.

“Government and local authorities must take urgent action to address the monopoly of short-term lets, particularly in the west of Ireland and more touristy areas,” she said.

The same day the government announced:

Under the new regime, short-term letters will have to register on an online platform run by Fáilte Ireland, and will need planning permission to operate as a short term let in order to do so. 

However, Government sources said that consideration was being given to allowing people without planning permission continue operating for a period of time, with two years currently under discussion. This would only apply in population centres under 20,000. Planning applications for short-term lets made in larger urban areas would operate on a basis where there would be a presumed refusal in place, with only limited grounds for approval.

The 20,000 population figure agreed by Government is a rowback on a previous position where the Government intended to introduce the restrictions in towns of 10,000 and above.

The government is certain ‘dealing’ with the problem. But not in a way that is likely to stop the immiseration of tens of thousands of people.

A political question

The latest edition of the Irish Times politics podcast presents itself as follows:

How Ireland Voted is a regular publication featuring academic analysis of Irish elections. The latest edition looks at the 2024 general election and features an essay by Gail McElroy and Stefan Müller that puts party manifestos under the microscope, identifying which topics get the most attention and where the parties line up from left to right.

It’s entitled:

Irish politics shifted left. Why?

Yes, why indeed, in a state run by two parties and a brace of independents who avoid state intervention in areas where there’s clear market failure such as housing, renting, a pressing need for a national health service, cost of living, significant inequality…

Shifting left? God, yeah, that’s a puzzle isn’t it?

‘Social Media & The Echochambers of Hate’

From DCAR.

“Scumbags wrecking their own city,”.…..“Get out before it is too late and something happens.” Then, finally, she messaged: “Please, please leave Evan….my heart is racing.” – A Dublin Mother.

Evan Moore is now serving a 3-year gaol sentence for his part in the Dublin riots. A young man sitting in a cell with nothing left except the wreckage of his own misdirection.

An examination of “Social Media & The Echochambers of Hate.”

Picture a grey, windy, Dublin evening where the rain falls sideways, and every brick of the city feels like it’s carrying the weight of ten lifetimes. A Garda van idles outside an average Dublin family home, its blue lights turning the wet pavement into a jittering disco of misery. A young fella is being led into the back of it. He looks barely out of his teens, hollow-eyed, like whatever he believed Ireland was supposed to be has already slipped through his fingers. And above him, tied to a lamppost with a cable tie, a tattered Tricolour twitching in the wind, looking like it was grabbed in a panic for a pound shop.

This is not the flag you saw on school walls or at All-Ireland finals. This is a flag hung like a warning sign. A piece of cheap polyester transformed into a signal flare of anger, confusion, and misplaced loyalty. And somehow, that sad image captures the entire storm that has rolled across Ireland: the hijacking of national symbols, the redirecting of legitimate working-class anger, the manipulation of vulnerable people from behind anonymous screens, and the slow, grinding destruction of community solidarity.

To understand this properly, you need to stand in the shoes of a working-class son of the Republic who grew up with the Tricolour explained not as a piece of nationalism, but as a fragile promise of unity. The green for the Gaelic tradition. The orange for the Protestant tradition. The white between them a hopeful sliver of peace. A flag that was meant to declare: Ireland is for all her people, in all their contradictions. So seeing it misused as a territorial marker, a visual form of intimidation, is a cultural and historical tragedy. It is the twisting of a symbol that was forged in struggle into something meaner and smaller than its original purpose.

The first thing that hits you about the current landscape is how cheaply the anger of the working class is being bought. Dubliners are no fools, but they are exhausted. Prices are up. Wages are static. Rents are parodied, level cruel. Young people are living in rooms the size of hot presses and being told to be grateful. The housing crisis is not a crisis anymore; it is a structural feature. And when a society traps its citizens in a corner, it produces rage. Real rage. Raw rage. Rage that should, in a sane world, rise upwards toward the systems and structures making life unlivable. But this rage is being siphoned off, redirected into a narrow cul-de-sac where it can do no real damage to the powerful.

This is where the micro, ethno-nationalist groups come in. These outfits are small, so small that if they all met in person, they could probably fit around a kitchen table in a mid-terrace in Phibsborough, but online they roar like lions. They are built from fragments: a handful of disillusioned middle-aged men, a scattering of angry young lads, a few online personalities who discovered that bluster is more profitable than clarity, and a swarm of anonymous accounts that always seem to use phrases and narratives that come straight from foreign culture, war factories. It is hard to pin down where these ideas originate, but it is plain enough that their ideological DNA aligns far more with international right-wing subcultures than with any Irish political tradition. The language they use feels imported. The memes are borrowed. The paranoia is recycled.

The online environment supercharges all of this. Social media platforms reward whatever gets the most engagement, and what gets the most engagement is always the same thing: conflict, outrage, fear, and simplicity. Nuance sinks like a stone. Complexity drowns. What rises is whatever sparks the fastest emotional reaction. So in a world where people are already under pressure, the algorithms push the most extreme voices to the top. This creates what feels like a mass movement, when in reality it is a small number of people amplified beyond recognition. It also creates a distorted reality, because the loudest voices are rarely the most representative. But they become unavoidable.

In this environment, national symbols are vulnerable. A flag is powerful precisely because it is simple. But simplicity can be twisted. A flag that once represented inclusion can be reframed as exclusion. When someone hangs a Tricolour outside their house during an international match, everyone knows what it means. But when someone hangs it outside a building that has just been the target of a protest or a confrontation, the meaning shifts. It becomes a form of marking territory, a way of saying who should feel welcome and who should feel fear. This is not patriotism. It is identity signalling. It is cultural ventriloquism: speaking in the name of a nation while betraying its core values.

The most tragic part is that the people caught up in this, particularly the younger men, are not villains. Many of them are victims of the very system they believe they are fighting. They are trapped in precarious work, precarious housing, and precarious futures. They live in communities where investment is a rumour. Their world shrinks every year. And when an anonymous online figure hands them a narrative that explains their pain in simple terms, it is intoxicating. It offers clarity where life offers only fog. It offers enemies where the real problem is a structure too large to punch. It offers a sense of purpose that feels revolutionary, even if its substance is hollow.

Some of these young men get radicalised to the point where they take actions that land them in court or prison. They believe they are engaged in something noble or heroic, but they are acting on narratives fed to them by people who never face the consequences of their own rhetoric. The anonymous accounts disappear after the damage is done. The online leaders continue broadcasting from safe distances. The think pieces, the livestream rants, the provocations, all of that continues. But the young man sitting in a cell has nothing left except the wreckage of his own misdirection.

And while all of this unfolds, the real culprits behind the housing crisis, the property speculators, the absentee landlords, the vulture funds and policy architects, continue uninterrupted. They benefit from the chaos. They thrive on distraction. Every time political attention is diverted onto migrants or refugees, the spotlight moves away from the structural foundations of the crisis. The working class becomes divided against itself, each group blaming the other for a scarcity that was engineered from above. This is the classic pattern of misdirection: keep people busy fighting over the crumbs while the loaf is spirited out the back door.

This situation is both familiar and heartbreaking. Ireland’s strongest political tradition is one of solidarity, anti-imperialism, collective struggle, and an instinctive understanding that oppression anywhere is a threat everywhere. But that tradition is fragile. It requires shared purpose, shared trust, a belief that your neighbour, no matter where they were born, has a stake in your freedom and you in theirs. When that trust erodes, reactionary movements flourish.

So what we are seeing now is not just political conflict. It is a deeper cultural collision between an Ireland that remembers its own history of emigration, dispossession, and exploitation, and an Ireland tempted by imported narratives that frame identity as a battlefield. It is the tension between a flag meant to unite and a flag misused to divide. It is the tension between real working-class struggle and the hollow theatre of online pseudo-movements.

Residential Tenancies Bill vote Wednesday night

Telling the confusion over aspects of the Residential Tenancies Bill to be voted on this evening in the Dáil. The Government frames this ‘as part of an effort to attract more investment into the property market’. Not difficult to see then whose rights are prioritised.

A row-back, and no surprise there:

Owners of properties in the short-term letting market who do not have planning permission could be given extra time to become compliant under a new regulatory regime being introduced by Government.

Under new rules agreed by Coalition leaders on Tuesday night , there will be an effective ban on granting planning permission for short-term lets in population centres of more than 20,000 people. 

Under the new regime, short-term letters will have to register on an online platform run by Fáilte Ireland, and will need planning permission to operate as a short term let in order to do so. 

However, Government sources said that consideration was being given to allowing people without planning permission continue operating for a period of time, with two years currently under discussion. This would only apply in population centres under 20,000. Planning applications for short-term lets made in larger urban areas would operate on a basis where there would be a presumed refusal in place, with only limited grounds for approval.

But that was meant to be population centres under 10,000.

The 20,000 population figure agreed by Government is a rowback on a previous position where the Government intended to introduce the restrictions in towns of 10,000 and above. 

Norma Foley and Michael Healy-Rae, respectively a Minister and Minister of State from Co Kerry, had previously opposed plans to cap short-term lets for large Irish towns, which would have affected those running Airbnb-style rentals in popular tourist towns such as Killarney.

Minister for Enterprise Peter Burke denied the change in policy confirmed on Tuesday was a response to pressure from Foley and Healy-Rae, and said instead he had been in discussions with the tourism sector over a number of months.

So there we have it. Weigh it up. Tourism or tenants? As noted here on numerous occasions, significant limits on Airbnb are necessary as part of the mix in terms of addressing this. But does it seem at all plausible that this government would be willing to impose them?

Already considerable criticism:

Sinn Féin attacked a provision in the proposed law which says that from 1 March, landlords whose properties become vacant will be able to reset rents to market rates.

There will be no changes for existing leases.

But new tenancies after 1 March will be subject to a minimum duration of six years in an effort to give tenants more security of tenure.

According to the Department of Housing: “Landlords will only be able to end the tenancy in specific situations, such as the tenant is not meeting their obligations or the property no longer suits the tenant’s needs.

No surprise – European attitudes to US harden

This surely can’t be a surprise, from last week the news that:

Western Europeans prize Europe’s autonomy and values over transatlantic ties and will not give them up to placate Donald Trump, according to a poll suggesting opinions of the US have plunged to their lowest since YouGov began tracking them a decade ago.

The US president’s attempted Greenland grab has succeeded in turning Europeans solidly against his country, the pollster’s latest survey found. Large majorities in Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Great Britain all declared an unfavourable opinion.

The figures, ranging from 62% in France to 84% in Denmark – of which Greenland is a self-governing territory – mark a further steep rise in negative perceptions of the US even since November, when the range was between 49% and 70%.

When US foreign policy to Europe appears to be a mixture of scolding and negging it’s hard to see who would see that as a positive. Apart from the usual sweepings of the far right and Trump wannabe grifters.

Still, the accompanying graphs show more or less identical tracking across the states across time – and here’s a key point:

However, they strongly disagree with the repeated US claim that European governments are excessively restrictive on free speech (18-31%), and fewer still share Trump’s view that the EU has been unfair in its trade dealings with the US (10-17%).

And interesting that the only are where there is some meeting of minds is on defence.

Respondents in Great Britain, Denmark, France and Germany – but not in Spain or Italy – would also be willing to boost national defence spending to keep the US on side, while Danes and Britons are more willing than not to greatly increase aid to Ukraine.

However, Europeans are generally unwilling to ease restrictions on hate speech, adopt a US-approved international trade policy, agree trade deals more favourable to the US than Europe, cover the cost of US armed forces in Europe, or disband the EU.

What’s stunning is how indifferent to how their message lands this US administration apparently is. There’s no thought about cause and effect or outcomes, it’s all relentless rhetoric designed, no doubt, largely for a domestic audience. That last is perhaps the key element. They don’t care much about Europe, for all the talk, other than as a diversion whenever it suits them.

No surprise at all that Europeans see that.

What you want to say – 11th February 2026

As always, following on Dr. X’s suggestion, it’s all yours, “announcements, general discussion, whatever you choose”, feel free.

Polling and polls

Paul Hosford had a good piece at the weekend in the Examiner where he argued that polling and polls are deceptive.

Just over a year after the Government was formed, the polls once again have Sinn Féin leading, with alarm bells being sounded about Fianna Fáil’s sluggish performance.

It’s deja vú all over again, as the great Yogi Berra once said. Part of this is simply frequency. Since the last general election, there have been 28 published opinion polls. That’s roughly one every two weeks.

Does the public mood swing to any great extent fortnight to fortnight? Is anyone, really, that mindful of a general election when the coalition looks solid, an election is four years away, and the country has had every type of poll it could have in the last two years? All debatable.

He’s right too that we’ve been here before. 2020 onwards saw a huge peak in SF’s nominal ‘support’ in poll after poll, only to be eaten away as the election drew closer. But let’s not overstate that peak. SF made it to the 30s, still well below FF in its heyday.

That said I’d be a bit sceptical of this:

Sinn Féin has spent much of the past five years looking like a party on the brink of power. 

It topped the popular vote in 2020, regularly polls near the top, and has successfully branded itself as the voice of voters  angry about housing,healthcare, and the cost of living. 

And yet, in general election terms, its path to government remains stubbornly uncertain.

Has it though? I think that’s an overstatement. It has looked like a party that might gain power, that has polled respectably given it had in 1997 just one TD elected. But however well many of us recall that election – and I do, that’s 30 years ago. And the political landscape is completely different now.

Hosford is correct that the arithmetic doesn’t quite stack up for SF, or indeed the left more broadly.

Irish elections are not winner-takes-all affairs, and governments are made in the space between parties rather than at the ballot box. 

Sinn Féin could again emerge with the highest vote share and still find itself locked out of power if Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael choose to do another deal — something both parties have shown they are perfectly willing to do, turning a once unthinkable coalition into a go-to centre holding option. Unless one of the Civil War parties blinks, Sinn Féin needs a crowded and potentially ideologically messy coalition to reach the magic number and that’s assuming that it can carry a large number of those seats.

Then there’s the question of whether there is a ceiling on its support and where it might be. 

That said something else is happening too. The Independent bloc seems to be subsiding somewhat, the ‘centre-left’ parties increasing their support somewhat, or at least moving back to the sort of vote share the LP used to have. And SF’s vote is ticking upwards slowly. Add to that the fact these parties are acting somewhat in concert – again let’s not overstate it, this isn’t the socialist millennia, but it’s not nothing either.

The context has changed. Does this mean FF and FG couldn’t cobble together another administration? Absolutely not, they are still at this point in a more favourable position all things considered than their opponents. But this isn’t 2022 or 2024.

As to the polls? Think numerous people have said it on this site over the years, best seen as potential indications of the direction of travel, not the destination.