Crowing landlords should change their tune

RIGHT CAN be on one’s side – and yet not appear so. The public approval of the Irish Property Owners Association (IPOA) for a court judgement in favour of a landlord for rent arrears of €60,000 may indeed be rooted in both moral and legal right.

But it strikes an unfortunate note in the current climate of landlords playing hardball with tenants over rents.

Commercial landlords are not only refusing to reduce rents in the face of the recession but, in some cases, are insisting on observance of the upwards-only clause in historical leases.

Most of us are familiar with the crisis in our shopping malls, with boarded-up shopfronts and the bitterness of hard-working owners who, in spite of repeated sales and staff reductions, simply could not afford to pay rents.

These rents, already high by comparisons of similar economies abroad, could just about be met during the boom.

Alas, falling sales in recent months have made many of those rents extortionate. (Yes, we know all the arguments about high land prices and banks on landlords’ backs for repayment of borrowing which funded the original purchase of said premises.)

But even a cursory look at most shopping areas today will show, not only the boarded frontages empty of stock, but the unwashed windows overhead, where the employees of offices and retail services have fled.

Hardly the time, then, for the IPOA to crow about the court’s decision.