Sir, – No thoughtful person would choose April 1st as the best, or least worst, date to lift the evictions ban. This is during the run-up to State and college and school exams, also a very bad time to have to move school. Eviction is stressful and difficult enough without betraying families with exam-taking young people into an impossible situation, which could cause years if not a lifetime of under-achievement, and mental-health struggles. In addition, this April is as bad as the worst possible time for finding rental accommodation. However, at the end of the college term, most third-level students give up their rental accommodation, making June and late May a somewhat better period for rental availability.
Extending the evictions ban by just three months, until July 1st, would make almost no difference to landlords seeking repossession, nor would it worsen the chilling effect of dysfunctional-market regulation on would-be landlords. However, alignment with the end of the academic year would be a significant improvement for students and for rental home hunters, not to mention providing some valuable additional time to get the “tenant in situ” and “first refusals” schemes up and running. – Yours, etc,
CLAIRE WHEELER,
Dublin 4.
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Sir, – Certain economic principles are unassailable. Primary among these is that if an activity is over-regulated and overtaxed, private investor supply to that activity will be curtailed, probably severely, with limited or no new entrants and many more market exits. This is the reality in which the Irish private rental market now finds itself. Left-wing parties and lobby groups have demanded the regulations including rent controls and eviction bans. Indeed, Sinn Féin and other leftists promise more of the same – a guaranteed way to drive thousands more landlords out of the market. Added to this is the misery of the quarterly misleading and misinterpreted Daft rent report which routinely headlines with double-digit inflation for rents in Ireland, when in fact rents across the country are remarkably stable for the vast majority of sitting tenants, as a deeper analysis of the rental market shows. Published inflation statistics, leftist parties, homelessness lobbyists and social policy commentators, all in comedic unison parrot misleading rental inflation statistics, which actually only relate to asking prices for the small number properties available to rent at a point in time on Daft.ie. For example, the Daft report allocates a full page in massive letters to tell us that “rents rise nationally 13.7 per cent; year-on-year change in average list rents” for 2022. Of course you have to read through to page 13 of the report, and in much smaller letters, to realise that rents for the sitting tenants actually only increased by 2.9 per cent nationally over the year, on average. Needless to say the media headlines and left-wing commentary were all about the 13.7 per cent figure, which is based on asking prices on a small number of adverts on Daft.ie. It is not even based on real tenancies.
Surely it must eventually dawn on all commentators that landlords are private investors; they invest their own savings and capital in rental properties. They also borrow in their own names to fund investment in residential properties to rent. Landlords take very significant risk with these investments, but have been vilified by leftists for years. The latest claim by the left is that landlords are selling to avail of high prices. With returns on other asset classes negative or extremely low, it makes no sense to shift from investing in residential property to holding deposits, shares or other financial assets, and yet landlords are doing just that as the burden of the rental market is simply too much to bear. The exodus will continue. – Yours, etc,
MARK MOHAN,
Castleknock,
Dublin 15.
Sir, – One of your letter-writers claims that there has been a “disproportionate impact on women of issues such as health, education, housing, caring for the sick, not to mention child-minding”. While the latter two are indubitably true, women have significantly better outcomes when it comes to both health and education, and given that 85 per cent of homeless persons sleeping on the streets are men, it is a bit hard to see how this affects women disproportionately. This is not to in any way diminish the societal challenges facing women, but we should also take into account that men also face challenges. – Yours, etc,
GERARD LALOR,
Ballybane,
Galway.
Sir, – While the State using the sticking-plaster solution of buying homes from private landlords might avoid immediate homelessness for those living in these houses, it fails to increase the actual number of homes in the country. How is there always so much cash on hand to alleviate the worst of the symptoms of Government policy, but never any to actually address the root cause of this in the first place? – Is mise,
COLM DOYLE,
Dublin 7.
Sir, – The eviction ban was only ever a sticking plaster and a poor one at that. It was rendered entirely useless by the fact that the Government used that time to do nothing, followed by a flurry of hand-flapping and vague reassurances of things having “turned a corner”. A tsunami of overwhelming misery is about to be unleashed, as people are evicted with literally nowhere to go.
A secure, safe and affordable home is a basic human right for everyone. There is no hierarchy in this regard. Public perception of housing and the homeless also play a part in where we now find ourselves. Decades of catastrophic housing policy will never change until every single person in this country accepts the principle that housing does not exist solely for the purpose of personal wealth creation. – Yours, etc,
JESSICA FREED,
Dublin 8.