Sex lives of young people affected by skyrocketing rents, Dáil hears

It can’t be “too good for the sex lives of young people” if they are forced to stay at home with their parents until their late 20s and 30s due to high rents, the Dáil heard on Wednesday.

Solidarity TD Mick Barry said “skyrocketing rents” were causing young people to stay at home with their parents for “far longer than most would wish”.

The Cork North-Central TD was speaking as People Before Profit put forward the Rent Reduction Bill 2023, which sets out to reduce rents to affordable levels by limiting them to a maximum of a quarter of monthly household incomes and to establish a National Rent Authority.

Mr Barry said the average age for leaving home was now 28 years old, while some people were being “forced to stay at home with their parents into their 30s”.

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“It has to cramp the style of young people,” he said. “I get the picture – parents today are more liberal than they were back in my day and in my time, but it can’t be too good for the sex lives of young people to be forced to stay at home with your parents until you’re 28 or into your 30s, and that’s apart from anything else.”

People Before Profit-Solidarity TD Paul Murphy listed out TDs who are landlords and said they should not participate in the vote on the Bill this evening and to do so would be “to engage in a conflict of interest”.

Minister of State at the Department of Housing Malcolm Noonan said apart from technical and practical operational shortcomings of the Bill, it would “in all likelihood face significant risk of legal challenge”.

Mr Noonan said it would also be likely to have a “severely detrimental effect” on supply of rental property and that the Government would be opposing the Bill.

[ ‘Rent is taking up two-thirds of my salary. I’ll most likely go to Australia’ ]

People Before Profit TD Richard Boyd Barrett said the Government repeatedly says that the Opposition “only critique the Government, but don’t offer solutions”.

“But actually what we’ve seen this morning is that the truth is the exact opposite of that,” he said. “We offer solutions, you [the Government] pick holes in them and offer no alternatives.”

The Dún Laoghaire TD said his constituency office had been contacted by a family facing eviction and “the bailiffs are coming around on Tuesday”.

“This is a family, who are both working and have two children, being evicted from the home they’ve lived in for 13 years, always paid their rent, never did anything wrong,” he said.

“To add insult to injury for this family, the mother works for an insurance company but she works from home, so if she goes into emergency accommodation, she loses her job as well.”

Sinn Féin TD Denise Mitchell said the decision to lift the eviction ban would “haunt” the Government for the time they have left in office and beyond that.

“Many vulnerable families and working families have been thrown to the wolves by your Government,” the Dublin Bay North TD told Mr Noonan.

Quoting from the list of TDs who had publicly registered their property interests, Mr Murphy said: “The names of the landlord TDs who should not vote on this Bill because they have a clear conflict of interest are as follows: Taoiseach Leo Varadkar of Fine Gael; Brian Leddin of the Green Party; Michael Creed of Fine Gael; John Paul Phelan of Fine Gael again; Richard Bruton of Fine Gael; Sean Canney of the Regional Independents; Noel Grealish, Regional Independent; Matt Shanahan, Independent; Alan Dillon, Fine Gael again; Robert Troy, Fianna Fáil; Michael Moynihan, Fianna Fáil; Thomas Byrne, Fianna Fáil; Seán Haughey, Fianna Fáil; James Lawless, Fianna Fáil; Aindreas Moynihan, Fianna Fáil; Brendan Smith, Fianna Fáil; Michael Healy-Rae, Rural Independents; Carol Nolan, Rural Independents; Alan Kelly, Labour; Johnny Guirke, Sinn Féin; Stephen Donnelly, Fianna Fáil.

“Those people should not participate in the vote. To do so is to engage in a conflict of interest,” he said.