Only a very few years ago, there was a clearly defined profile of the people who rented property in this country. There were, and still are, those perpetually transient and lucratively challenged residents, students. The seasonal short-term rental of houses by holidaymakers both from home and abroad will always be with us. And then there were those people who rented flats or shared houses in the early years of their first job - after which it was taken for granted that they would have saved up enough to put a deposit on their own house.
It's no longer presumed that you will ascend the property ladder so fluently. With property prices in urban areas such as Dublin and Galway reaching almost fictional heights, people are now having to rent their accommodation for longer periods of time. Also, with the concept of a job for life something which is no longer the norm, and with many more people either working on short-term contracts or on a freelance basis, it is difficult to get a mortgage under any circumstances. This sector of the rental market, now encompassing people well into their 20s and 30s has changed enormously in size within the decade.
The bedsit or shoebox flat with its inevitable flowery carpet and chipboard walls which you occupied as a student or in your early working days becomes less attractive with each passing year of adulthood. However, although a tenant may move on to and into more pleasant accommodation, there is not a lot of difference between the rights you have there and the rights you had in the flowery bedsit. To be a tenant in Ireland is to be in an unenviably vulnerable situation.
"Tenants have very, very few rights," reports Kieran Murphy, director of Threshold, the national housing organisation. When in possession of a lease, tenants have two basic rights. One is assured tenancy for the agreed period of the lease. The other is a fixed rent for the duration of that tenancy. "Leases for private accommodation very rarely exceed a year, whereas it's easy to get five or 10 years on a commercial lease," Murphy points out.
"After the first year, you'll find that periodic tenancy is quite usual, going from month to month. Landlords quite often won't renew the lease after that first year. They like to keep their options open, especially in this kind of property climate. They don't want to miss a sale because there's still 11 months left to run on the lease."
Without a lease, it is a very grim story indeed. Tenants have almost no rights at all and very little security, other than the fact that notice to quit by a landlord cannot legally be less than four weeks (even if you are paying rent on a weekly basis). Several years of tenancy (unless 20 years or more) in one place does not automatically qualify you for more rights than someone who's only been renting for a year.
There is almost nothing that landlords can't get away with in Ireland. They can put the rent up to whatever they like; there is no legal rent-increase ceiling. In very many cases of rented accommodation, it is only the landlord's good will which stands between you and the door.
"If you're renting in this country, you're made to feel like a second-class citizen," says Isobel Smith. Together with her young son, she had been paying rent of £400 a month in southside Dublin. "I paid the rent on time; when the washing machine needed fixing, I paid for it and never bothered the landlord."
Three years after she first started renting the property, a letter arrived from the landlord via the estate agent, with a revised rent. "It had gone up to £800 a month. He said my previous rent was at a `prehistoric' rate for the area. It was terrifying. There was no way I could pay that much more and I had my son to worry about." Through her "brilliant" network of friends, Isobel found another place and moved out within weeks.
Ireland is unique within Europe for two reasons. It has the highest proportion of home owners and, not surprisingly in light of this, it also has the worst record of rights for its tenants who rent their homes privately.
The situation in Germany is fairly typical of Continental Europe. It is the almost the reverse of the situation in Ireland. Approximately 60 per cent of Germany's population rent their homes. All apartment blocks built before 1920, in which the majority of tenants live, are rent controlled. Rent cannot be increased by more than five per cent per year. Minimum notice to quit starts at three months and the longer you have been in a place, the longer notice both tenant and landlord must give each other; a ruling which protects both parties. Prior to vacating, a tenant in Germany must totally renovate and paint the entire flat, walls and ceilings. This arrangement means that you'd be unlikely to be upping sticks every few months.
Louise Mullen, who is an advice worker at Threshold, has heard it all. Apart from rent increases, the most common complaints from the public about the state of their rented accommodation are: "Dampness - that's the big one. Also, vermin. And then, there's the things that need maintenance, like water pressure."
A colleague recounts the bizarre problem with the Leeson Street flat in Dublin she once rented. "There was only boiling hot water in the place, no cold. I had to get up at five a.m. to run a bath and let it cool down for later." Most surreal of all, even their toilet flushed with steaming hot water, like a miniature Icelandic geyser. It was three months before the landlord got it fixed.
Legally, landlords are obliged to provide their tenants with a certain standard of accommodation, as specified by the 1993 Housing Regulation law. These include: ensuring that the house is in a good state of structural repair; hot and cold running water; providing a source of heating; installing and maintaining the electricity/gas supply; providing a secure bannister for stairways. If landlords do not maintain these standards, they can be eligible for prosecution.
Since 1996, landlords who rent to tenants who are non-relatives have been legally obliged to register their properties with the local authority. Threshold estimates that, nationwide, there are 100,000 properties in the rented sector.
"Yet, two years on from this regulation, only 25,000 landlords have registered with the authorities. And the reason is almost certainly tax evasion," says Kieran Murphy. "So it's impossible to check and see if these basic standards are being maintained. Yes, the Government has made efforts to regulate the private rented sector, but they have failed abysmally in terms of enforcing it."
Last Friday was the second anniversary of the 1996 Registration of Rented Housing Regulation. In a statement responding to the low figures of registered landlords, the Department of Environment and Local Government said: "Enforcement of the regulations in their functional areas is the responsibility of local authorities." The buck, it would appear, just keeps on passing.
Kathrina Cahill is the director of Home Locators, which was formed in 1982. "When we opened, apart from students, nobody was renting. All the students were living in big old Georgian or Victorian houses that were divided into flats which were cheap to rent. That sort of accommodation is slowly but steadily dying out. I feel sorry for young people or couples looking for that kind of modest accommodation nowadays." Many of these old houses are now being reconverted back to their original layout and either selling or renting as entire properties.
Two months ago, Home Locators dropped its free "share accommodation and flat and bedsit listing service" which used to attract queues of people to its office twice weekly. "It was very popular," admits Cahill. She is businesslike and unapologetically frank about the reasons for its demise. "We wanted to focus on the corporate end of the market."
Certainly, you'd need to be an employee at a very successful company to afford any of the properties available from Home Locators. The monthly rent on a four-bedroom Ballsbridge house currently on offer is "£67,000". The rental deposit is £6,000: a sum which many readers of this article who are home-owners may well have set down as a deposit on their property as recently as the days when Michael Flatley first introduced us to the Celtic Flamenco. "Home Locators" now seems a bit of a misnomer. "Corporate Pads" would be more like it.
None of this is good news to the average noncorporate punter. It will be some time before the fallout from the recent measures to calm the property market, implemented in the wake of the Bacon Report, manifests itself. One side, the builders and auctioneers, are predictably screaming about a dire shortage of properties to rent in the future. The Government, in the meantime, is determined that the ending of the tax break for investors will stabilise the market for future potential buyers. Whatever the outcome, the rented sector will be one which will be closely watched and analysed over the next year or two.
