Far be it from me to correct American statesman Benjamin Franklin, but it is more than death and taxes that are life’s only certainties. He didn’t have to contend with the never-happy property sector.
Changes to new rent-setting rules due to start on March 1st could now be challenged in court by a group of property developers, whose powers to evict well-behaved, rent-paying tenants would be limited. The developers are objecting to a proposed ban on no-fault evictions for large landlords with more than four tenancies. The measure would not apply to landlords with three tenancies or fewer and would, they say, be an “unjust attack” on their property rights under the Constitution.
Ministerial meddling in the sector has again brought risk and potential delay. Policy is being determined by industry and defined by entropy. To bring rents down, the Government agrees to let them rise; to bring certainty, it announces changes; and to bring clarity, it introduces confusion.
In his classic 2010 book, The Rule of Law, Tom Bingham, the late lord chief justice of England and Wales set out his eight principles of the legal system. The first of these is that “the law must be accessible and so far as possible intelligible, clear and predictable”.
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The new rental rules fail Bingham’s first principle. They introduce multiple levels of security of tenure and multiple methods of rent setting. They mean a tenant’s security of tenure may change mid-tenancy through no fault of their own, depending on the number of tenancies owned by their landlord. This makes the status of the tenancy unpredictable and instantly changeable.
Rules will be different for large and small landlords, with a seemingly arbitrary distinction between landlords with four tenancies, and those with three. Why not 10 tenancies, or 50, or two? What is to stop a large landlord becoming a series of small landlords?
The new rules will be open to differing interpretation by both landlords and tenants. The result will likely be an increase in referrals to the Residential Tenancies Board (RTB) as well as the further development of a mini-industry of professional intermediaries and uninformed people potentially making illegal agreements and giving poor advice.
Disputes before the RTB will become more complex and increasingly involve the use of lawyers, which will introduce a bias in favour of landlords. This will make the process more expensive and less efficient for both landlords and tenants. The private rental sector is also extensively used by people whose first language is not English, putting these people at a further disadvantage.
The rules are not intuitive. They need to be simple, otherwise people will be exploited. Complexity is the enemy of good policy and good law. Confusing matters further, a recent phenomenon seen in the Irish private rental market is the addition of mandatory charges on top of rent for services thatwould normally have been the responsibility of the landlord, for example, the upkeep and maintenance of common areas. Known as “junk fees”, in one case the fees amount to €200 extra a month. The RTB wrote to the landlord in question, which may not be a huge relief to tenants everywhere.
[ What is happening to Irish rental laws?Opens in new window ]
These charges should not exist, but until the RTB or the courts make such a determination, they do. The new rental changes propose recording rents in all tenancies to help everybody know what is being charged across the sector. The weak link is that it has been decided to exclude these hidden extra charges from the definition of rent.
The exclusion will cause three things to happen. The first is that any public rent register will become divorced from reality as additional charges are introduced in a more widespread manner: what is recorded will not reflect accurately what the tenant is paying for their accommodation.
In turn, this will make it difficult for any prospective tenant to accurately gauge the “real” rent (and total outgoings) for a property or to compare them. Comparing the rents between dwellings will become more difficult as the exact terms and conditions would have to be revealed to make a valid comparison. This will make setting a market rent every six years more complicated and give larger landlords an advantage in rental setting as they will have information that they can use selectively.
Thirdly, inaccurate data will also inaccurately record rents as public record in official indices, which will then be used to formulate policy. The increased data-sharing components of these proposals are welcomed, but poor data is nearly as bad as none.
It is a serious missed opportunity not to start the section on deposit protection schemes, which has been in train since 2015. Retention and the return of tenants’ deposits have consistently been in the top three of RTB tenant-landlord disputes for the last two decades, and the new rules may exacerbate that. In the 12 months to October 2025, there were 1,918 dispute applications received by the RTB concerning deposit retention, a 66 per cent increase since 2019. A decade on, there is no ministerial move to improve the situation.
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This is the seventh piece of rent sector legislation in the last decade, averaging one every 17 months. The frequency and complexity of repeated legislative change reflect the absence of a long-term vision for the private rented sector.
For example, what proportion of households does the Government see as being permanently resident in the private rented sector? Who is the sector for? How many small, medium and large landlords does it envisage as supplying the sector, and in what proportion? What are its plans in other areas of Government policy that will need to be altered – for example, pensions if more older people retire while renting? And what happens to asset-based welfare, home-ownership, social equality and household wealth in relation to the changes in the private rented sector?
With no clear policy direction, the Government becomes ever more receptive to vested interests’ demands, leading to more market interference, adding complexity and ultimately deterring new entrants to the sector – which is supposedly the point of the legislation in the first place.
Lorcan Sirr is senior lecturer at Technological University Dublin
