Cowboy country

Renting. Just a vowel away from ranting. Landlords, eh? I've known a few. Naw, scrub that, I've known a lot. On the last count, due to a wanderlust gene, I've had some 26 addresses in five countries in the past 10 years. You would think this must qualify me for some kind of Accommodation Big Hunter Expert badge, but my most recent quest for a place to live almost had me considering another relocation from Ireland.

For the past few weeks, I've been looking for a one-bedroom apartment to rent in Dublin - me and 50 million others, as I soon discovered. Although you can't live in this country and not have some idea of the current property frenzy, I really had no idea how dire the situation had become, both for those seeking to buy some where on a limited income and for those who are renting. And it is dire. For me, and many of my non-property-owning friends, the property supplements all the national newspapers now bring out weekly are not unlike a type of new pornography: screaming headlines that salivate offensively over unreasonably priced houses: Page Threes with Huge Assets.

Previously, it had been my experience that, as a tenant, there were more options open to you: renting rather than buying, you could live pretty much in the area you wanted to, and almost certainly in a much swankier place than you could afford to buy. Not so these days, as I discovered once I started looking for the type of accommodation that's most in demand in Dublin.

"There is a huge shortage of one-bedroom apartments," says Mary McGarry Murphy, who is the business development manager for Wyse Estate Agents. "They are the most sought-after - by people coming back to Ireland, corporate workers, couples and professional people who want to live on their own. There's a shortage of accommodation generally, but the one-beds are the most scarce." She has seen rents increase by 20 per cent in the past year alone, going up from about £500£550 to between £600 and £800 a month.

For almost three weeks, I searched for an apartment more or less on a daily basis. I paid a non-refundable £50 to a letting agency, whose selling point seemed to be that the properties on their list were ones which did not make it to the papers. Funnily enough, most of the places I wanted to see on their list were advertised in the papers, and so whenever I turned up to view a place, I found up to 20 other people there before me. I called personally to seven letting agents, and then phoned them every few days to see if anything new had come in, which was beginning to make me feel like a stalker, although to give those agents their due, they were always unfailingly courteous and sympathetic.

What else? I scoured the papers; I used all the contacts I could find; I walked around the areas I wanted to live in, taking down phone numbers of agents who had Let By signs up, and calling them to see if they had anything else. I was not exactly lying down on the job, so to speak. Yet I was seeing virtually nothing that was suitable, either in terms of what I could afford, or of where I could see myself actually enjoying living. Not too much to ask for, when you consider what you are renting is your home. Yes, folks, those legendary dumps still exist.

A man in a suit from a reputable estate agent showed me a filthy, damp, unheated kip in a rundown house in Ranelagh, which had a broken toilet and sundry other attractions for £500 a month. Even by student standards, this was horrible, yet the agent seemed quite astonished when I declined to sign on the dotted line forthwith. "Well, it's an unbeatable location," was his defence, when I drew his attention to the several deficiencies of the property.

I took to describing places I was going to see, as "viewing ranches" since so many of the agents or owners were cowboys. A place on Pembroke Road that had been described to me by the agent as "a one-bedroomed apartment" turned out to be a tiny bedsit with a bed-filled alcove off it. For £600 a month. And there was a queue to see it. I didn't even have the heart to view the ground-floor apartment in Ranelagh I looked at from the outside beforehand, only to discover all the windows were frosted glass, and several were barred.

AT one stage I got so desperate I even looked at a two-bedroomed apartment, just because it was there. The second "bedroom", right inside the front door, was what I have always known as a cloakroom: there was just about room for a single bed in it, and absolutely nothing else. Apart from the fact that the £800 rent was out of my league, I don't want to live in a dim basement. "Well, you're very fussy," scolded the boyo who was showing me round the ranch, when I told him this.

He took out his lassoes and started doing his tricks. "See this place?" he began, "It breaks my heart." Me too. "The woman who owns it, she should be getting £2,000 a month for it. Everyone wants to live in this city. It's the best city in the world! And there's not enough apartments to go round! The owner could get what she wants for it, I keep telling her to up and up the rent."

It was at this stage that I realised that while I now saw a man in spiked boots and a 10-gallon hat when I saw an estate agent, what he saw every day were not prospective tenants in search of a home at all, but zombies cum walking chequebooks. When he heard my housemates had been in our current accommodation for three years, he tutted. "I always get my tenants out after two years," he confided. "Two years and they all have to go - at that stage, they think they own the place and they want you to do things for them, like painting and fixing."

While it was a deeply depressing conversation, it was also pure entertainment at one level, which is where it turned up again a week later, practically word for word. I sat in the Peacock Theatre, at the opening night of Jimmy Murphy's new play, The Muesli Belt, listening to Mossy Plunkett, the property-developer character, rant on: "If I had me way I'd tear down every stick and stone in this town and rebuild the whole thing. Listed buildings, historical sites. Take a bloody photograph of the kips and be done with them. There's people want homes in this city so bad you could sell them a kennel. And I've sold a few! Space is the future and I don't mean up there. The GPO! A post office, that's all it is, a stamp shop and the size of it! Tear the f***ing thing down and let Mossy Plunkett get his hands on what's left!"

Of course there are decent landlords out there; it's just that so many others are so greedy. Anyway, things in the private rented sector are almost certainly going to undergo changes to tenants' advantage this year. Threshold, the tenants' rights association, along with representatives from the St Vincent de Paul, Wyse estate agents, the Union of Students in Ireland, and others, have been meeting since last September as the Commission on the Private Rented Residential Sector. They will present the report of their findings to Minister of State Bobby Molloy, who has special responsibility for housing and urban renewal, on June 1st, and hope there will be prompt action taken on their recommendations.

Kieran Murphy, Threshold's director, hopes action will be taken on three main issues. "Security of tenure needs a radical overhaul. At the moment, landlords don't even have to give reasons when they ask tenants to leave. We would like to see a situation where tenants leave only because the property is to be sold, or a family member will be moving in instead - not because of a huge rent increase. We would also like to see some sort of controlled rent system, and to put dispute resolution mechanisms in place - to improve relations between landlords and tenants."

With the levels of public dissatisfaction about the rented sector running at an all-time high, Murphy and his colleagues feel that this time the Government will have to address the issues their report will raise. No doubt both landlords and tenants will be watching for the political reaction to the June report with keen and equal interest.

(And yes, by sheer luck and a personal contact I did eventually find a really lovely apartment.)