Rundale

Protest outside IBEC Property Conference. Source: CATU

Michelle Connolly and Fiadh Tubridy

On 1 March 2026, the ‘Residential Tenancies (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2026’ came into effect. Under this legislation landlords will, in many circumstances, be able to increase rents beyond the existing 2% annual limit. Landlords will be able to reset rents to ‘market rate’ every six years and in between tenancies, if a tenant leaves voluntarily. According to government housing policy: “The resetting of rents to market value for new tenancies will help stimulate investment and retain existing landlords in the market.” The new legislation also extends the Rent Pressure Zone (RPZ) system to the entire Republic of Ireland and provides limited protections against evictions by larger landlords.

The RPZ changes have been condemned by all of the opposition parties and by tenant representative organisations, including CATU and Threshold. Threshold has pointed out that, in a context where rents are already unaffordable, there has been no detailed analysis of the likely impact on rent levels. In its report on the proposed changes the Housing Agency acknowledges that rents will rise as a result of the changes while also claiming that increased supply should have a longer term ‘dampening effect’ on future price increases, but doesn’t present any evidence for this claim. Meanwhile there is plenty of evidence to the contrary, such as research from the Central Bank showing that institutional investors, which the new legislation is specifically designed to attract, increase rents at a disproportionate rate compared to their smaller scale counterparts.

Some corporate landlords, like LRC Group, had already found ways to get around the previous RPZ rules, such as by adding on mandatory service fees which they claimed weren’t covered by 2% increase limit. The new legislation creates new loopholes and opportunities to increase rents as clearly illustrated by the recent news that IRES is refusing to allow tenants to swap out departing flatmates while maintaining their existing contracts.

There is also plenty of evidence that the new legislation will also lead to even greater numbers of evictions. CATU’s Eviction Nation report has highlighted that corporate landlords are already responsible for a significant and growing proportion of evictions in the private rental sector. And international evidence shows that, in other cases where limits on rent increases between tenancies have been removed, landlords frequently use tactics like neglecting maintenance and harassing tenants so that they leave ‘voluntarily’ The new legislation does not include any measures to prevent these type of tactics.

Given all the problems with the new legislation, how did the government come up with it? And how did it ever get to the point of being introduced? To answer this we need to consider what the academic Richard Waldron has described as ‘the overly close relationship between policy-makers and the development lobby” in Ireland and how this has resulted in “a process of decision-based evidence making whereby corporate research and industry expertise are used as a veneer to justify policy decisions after the fact”. In other words, the government wrote and enacted this legislation because developers lobbied them to do it.

One such lobbying group is Irish Institutional Property (IIP). Founded in 2019 as a representative organisation for large corporate landlords and investors, IIP hired their CEO and only employee Pat Farrell fresh off a stint working as the Head of Communications and Government Relations for Bank of Ireland. He’d been responsible for PR at Ireland’s biggest bank during the recession, previously head of the Irish Banking Federation during the 2008 financial crisis and before that had been General Secretary of Fianna Fáil from 1991 – 1997. He was also on the board of tenants’ rights advocacy group Threshold from 2009 – 2013, a voluntary role that is not mentioned on his LinkedIn profile.

Someone with this kind of experience was ideally positioned to help with the atrocious public image of investment funds and institutional landlords. Pat was on the job immediately, making sure the Irish media picked up his message – institutional funds are not bad, they’re just misunderstood, relentlessly abused by being called names like “vultures” and “cuckoos”. They are, he argued, essential for building homes in Ireland in the 21st century because the State won’t be able to build without their investment.

Going back to Richard Waldron’s point about the role of industry-generated ‘evidence’, Pat Farrell prides himself on a “sober, data-driven” approach. IIP commission reports about various aspects of construction, planning and housing policy that they often publish on their website. The main intended audience for these reports appears to be government ministers, their advisors, and senior civil servants who write and enact policies and legislation.

These reports are often sent directly to government officials as part of IIP’s prolific lobbying.  As of the time of writing, IIP have lobbied 145 times since 2019. That’s roughly 20 lobbying requests per year. Farrell has had over 80 meetings with government officials as part of this lobbying since 2019. Emails, letters, phone calls, meetings with government officials (in person and virtual) are all in a day’s work. He’s been invited to present his policy recommendations directly to the Oireachtas. He’s lobbied regarding taxation, budgetary matters, employment, planning and of course housing, in many cases with great success – there are many examples of IIP’s submissions being debated in the Oireachtas and turned into legislation.

One example of Pat Farrell’s direct line to legislation is his lobbying for the Housing Shared Equity Loan Scheme. In July 2020, IIP published a report called “Shared ownership/shared equity loan schemes – bridging the housing affordability gap“. A year later in July 2021, Minister for Housing Darragh O’Brien introduced the Housing Shared Equity Loan Scheme, which was widely criticised, not only by opposition parties, but also by the Central Bank, the ESRI, and the Department of Public Expenditure.

The scheme funds up to 30% of the build cost or purchase price of a new property for first-time buyers, essentially giving public money to developers (like IIP’s members), because most people can’t afford to buy homes at the price they’re asking for. Many of the details of this scheme bear uncanny resemblance to IIP’s July 2020 report. Opposition TD Eoin Ó Broin described it as “the clearest example I have seen in all of my time in the Oireachtas of private industry writing the policies of Government.”

Another example is Pat’s lobbying around the controversial ‘Residential Tenancies (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2026’, discussed at the outset of the article. In May 2025, Pat Farrell publicly described rent caps as “disastrous”, saying they were directly responsible for stalling the building of new housing in Ireland. His argument went that anyone considering developing and building build-to-let housing in Ireland was being put off by the fact that they would not be able to raise rents as much as they might want to. It was “not lucrative enough“.

Prior to this in February 2025, records accessed via FOI request show that Irish Institutional Property, along with numerous other property industry actors such as Kennedy Wilson, IRES REIT and the Construction Industry Federation, had been invited by the Housing Agency to respond to a survey to “inform the Department [of Housing’s] review of RPZs.” IIP’s response included several recommendations which made into the final legislation including, most importantly, allowing rents to be reset to ‘market rate’ between tenancies.

Shortly after this, in June 2025, Pat requested a meeting with David Kelly, Assistant Secretary at the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage, which he was swiftly granted. FOI records show that Pat brought at least four other people to this meeting, all of them representatives from various IIP members (including US real estate investors Kennedy Wilson and Hines, and Irish real estate companies Cairn Homes and Activate Capital) with one of the topics of discussion being a “Rental Sector Review”. Pat also sent along a document titled “Rent Cap Transition – implementation considerations for private sector funders and providers of rental accommodation”, which is essentially IIP’s wishlist for the forthcoming legislation.

Soon before the bill came into effect, TD Eoin Ó Broin noted with concern that the bill was put through the Oireachtas unusually fast, eliminating several of the Committee stages legislation normally goes through. TD Rory Hearne emphasised the level of lobbying – particularly Pat Farrell’s lobbying – that influenced the bill, saying “the really disappointing part of this Bill is that it came about on foot of a decision that was made directly as a result of lobbying by institutional investors… the lobbying register… shows the number of times Pat Farrell from Irish Institutional Property has met with the Government in respect of these policies – there is a list of meeting after meeting – and to push for these changes.”

A particularly interesting dimension to Pat Farrell’s lobbying for IIP is his longstanding links to Fianna Fáil. He was the General Secretary of the party during the 1990s, a position that saw him responsible for the day-to-day running of the party for six years and working on three general election campaigns. As the CEO of IIP, Pat Farrell has denied being overly familiar with Leinster House and its TDs, but his lobbying returns suggest a preference for lobbying Fianna Fáil TDs when possible, ahead of those from Fine Gael who may be no less investor-friendly but with whom he presumably has fewer personal connections.

Fine Gael’s Housing Minister Eoghan Murphy was mostly left alone by IIP, with only one direct lobbying request in 2020 regarding Covid support packages. In contrast, Fianna Fáil’s Darragh O’Brien, who became Minister for Housing in 2020, and his successor and party colleague James Browne are intimately familiar with the organisation, judging from the very large number of meetings, emails, phone calls, letters, and “informal communications” recorded in lobbying returns.

Despite Pat’s assertion that “I go to Leinster House when I need to go but I’m not somebody who’s a part of the furniture around it”, we have to wonder why the CEO of an organisation representing landlords and property owners didn’t lobby the Department of Housing particularly frequently until it was run by people from his former employer, Fianna Fáil?

It has recently been reported that Pat Farrell is now leaving his role in IIP, and moving on to a position on the board of Sherry FitzGerald Group, a home-grown property company to which he has family ties (his brother Liam Farrell owns SherryFitzgerald Farrell in Carrick On Shannon). His successor in IIP, Mandy Johnston, will surely be well placed to continue lobbying for the interests of institutional landlords. Similar to Pat, she has a background in PR and government, having worked both as a government press secretary for Fianna Fáil, and running her own public affairs firm Blue Yard Consultancy. She has plenty of lobbying experience both from her role at Blue Yard and as the CEO of Irish Offshore Operators Association, the representative body for Ireland’s offshore oil and gas industry.

Between this new appointment and Farrell’s career history, it’s very clear that, despite what the lobbyists say, it’s all about power and connections and a lot less about evidence.