Gavan Reilly: Rushed scrutiny on rental laws will be bad news for everyone

Generally speaking I’m not one who takes traditions, and traditional thinking, as gospel.

There’s no point retaining old styles of thinking, or older ways of doing things, if they’re not fit for the modern purpose.

But sometimes old sayings are old for a reason: because they’re often proved true.

This comes to mind as the Dáil finally gets to see the text of legislation to overhaul the private rental sector.

James Browne, the housing minister, unveiled his plans last June – including a minimum six-year lease, and removing the right for large landlords to enforce ‘no fault’ evictions on tenants – but it’s taken until now to draft legislation that actually puts it in place.

That’s quite a long lead-in time for legislation which is supposed to take effect in about a month.

Browne insists the new rules will be ready to kick in on March 1st, but they’re not being put to the Dáíl this week, after which there are only eleven sitting days left.

And this will be quite a big, and quite technical, piece of lawmaking. For example there is now to be some kind of special treatment of students, who will get three-year rent freezes (but allow resets to market rates afterwards), and to tenants of Fair Deal participants who will not have the security of a six-year lease.

There’s also a separate set of tenancy rights depending on how many properties a landlord owns.

It’s all very finicky, and is worthy of reasonable and thorough line-by-line scrutiny as it goes through.

The Oireachtas housing committee has already done heavy scrutiny of an early draft, but nothing compares to seeing the final draft of a major and technical Bill.

All of which is to say: there’s a reason why people saying “act in haste, repent in leisure”.

The stakes are too high to get this stuff wrong.