Small landlords and the housing market
Sir, – Are we using the wrong metric to measure rental capacity in Ireland? As a small private landlord in the residential market, I believe the new legislative changes, combined with strict rent controls, make it more rational for landlords to sell and leave the market rather than remain in it.
This is unfortunate, because each time a landlord exits the rental market we are losing far more than one rental unit. We are actually losing bedrooms, and this is the metric that truly matters. It is the same metric we use when assessing hotel capacity, because it tells us how many people can be accommodated, not how many buildings exist.
A house is counted as one unit whether it contains one bedroom or five. This is not a useful measure of rental capacity. A landlord will make sure that every bedroom is available to the rental market, whereas a typical owner-occupier will not. When a three- or four-bedroom rental house is sold into the private market, one or even two bedrooms will often fall out of circulation. Even though there is an economic incentive for homeowners to rent out spare rooms through the Rent-A-Room Relief Scheme, it is not taken up nearly as much as it could be.
We may in fact be making the rental crisis worse despite building more houses. If we lose 10 rental houses to owner occupiers, we may actually be losing 20 or 30 bedrooms to the rental market, not 10. Our policies are ignoring this simple fact.
READ MORE
We need to rethink how we measure housing supply. It should be measured in bedrooms, not in units. Until we acknowledge that the real bottleneck is room availability, we will continue to design policies that have the opposite effect to their intention and reduce supply even when they should be increasing it. – Yours, etc,
JOHN O’NEILL,
Whitefriar Street,
Dublin 8.
Not lighting up
Sir, – It has been on my mind to write this letter to your newspaper for the last few weeks, but the recent spate of road deaths has prompted me to write today as a matter of urgency.
I drive through Swords and on to Balbriggan daily, usually between the hours of 7am and 8.30am and am struck by the darkness on many streets and roads during these times. The streets and roads are already busy with commuters and pedestrians, including schoolchildren walking and on bikes and scooters, yet the street lights are off. It can be the same after 4pm as twilight and sometimes full-blown darkness creeps in.
What exactly are the Road Safety Authority or Department of Transport guidelines to councils around lighting-up times?
The lights on the M1 motorway at the Lusk service station entry/exit points were off at 4.30pm last Monday. Thankfully there was a clear sky, but on other darker, rainy evenings it is pitch black on that section where vehicles merge.
Are cost-savings being put ahead of road safety? – Yours, etc
CIARÁN RYAN,
Swords,
Co Dublin.
Moves to de-name Herzog Park
Sir, – Ed Abrahamson (Opinion, November 23rd) paints an accurate picture of the depth of visceral hostility to Israel in Ireland. As if to illustrate the point, within days we have Dublin County councillors proposing to de-name a park named after an Irish-born Jew, Chaim Herzog, whose elevation to the presidency of Israel was once a source of pride in this country. The politicians who have criticised this proposal are the very ones who have allowed anti-Israel sentiment to be whipped into a frenzy they are now trying to rein in.
Many in Ireland will explain or justify this hostility as a reaction to the scale of civilian casualties and physical destruction in Gaza, which I agree are wholly unacceptable. However, the reality is that virulent anti-Israel sentiment predates the war and reflects an extreme one-sidedness in our perception of this conflict. This is a stance that views Israel as the relentless oppressor and the Palestinians as victims who bear no responsibility for the failure to resolve this decades-old conflict. This is a selective and distorted view of history that to many outside Ireland can only be explained by anti-Semitism.
Take the two-state solution. While there is a strong constituency in Israel that rejects a Palestinian state, personified by Binyamin Netanyahu, it is the Palestinian side that has consistently rejected concrete proposals that would have delivered Palestinian statehood, beginning in 1947.
Israel was created by a resolution of the UN General Assembly in 1947 which partitioned British-administered Palestine into two states: a “Jewish Palestinian” and an “Arab Palestinian” state (as the two groups were then known). The Jewish population – desperate people who had fled the pogroms, the Nuremberg laws and the Holocaust – accepted this two-state solution, while the Arab Palestinians and the Arab states rejected it outright and declared war on Israel on the second day of its existence. Israel won the war and refused to allow the return of some 700,000 Palestinians who had fled the war with the strong encouragement of the Arab states who wanted a clear run at wiping out Israel, thereby starting the Palestinian refugee problem.
For 20 years Jordan occupied the West Bank and Egypt the Gaza Strip and neither made the smallest effort to create a state for their brother Arabs, an ambivalence that persists to this day.
Over a 30-year period, starting in the early 1990s, there have been four big peace initiatives intended to create a Palestinian state supported by Israel: the Oslo Accords in the 1990s, US president Bill Clinton’s Camp David summit in 2001, Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert’s offer to the Palestinian Authority in 2008, and the Barack Obama presidency’s peace initiative in 2017.
Camp David would have given a Palestinian state the Gaza Strip and over 90 per cent of the West Bank and still the Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, walked away and returned to violence. Mr Olmert, possibly the most liberal Israeli PM, went even further where the sovereignty of Jerusalem was concerned and received the same rebuff. To these we can add Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, which was supposed to create a prototype Palestinian state and ended in the unspeakable barbarity of October 7th, 2023.
It is hard to know whether it is ignorance of the history of this conflict, wilful indifference, or even darker forces, that fuel the extreme hostility to Israel that has developed in this country. What is not in doubt is the serious damage it is doing to our standing and reputation. – Yours, etc,
ALAN O’SULLIVAN,
Kilcoole,
Co Wicklow.
Sir, – As a long-time resident overlooking Herzog Park, I was disturbed by the proposal to change the name of the park. I was there in 1995 when the great Seán “Dublin Bay” Loftus opened the park. It was a joyous and inclusive occasion for the small Irish-Jewish community. I have gone on a silent protest march in support of the Palestinian people and to abhor what the Israeli government led by the war crime leader Netanyahu has done. Are we trying to totally erase the history of Jews in Ireland who have contributed so much to Irish society? – Yours, etc,
NIALL MacDONAGH.
Rathgar.
Dublin 6.
Sir, – Dublin City Council’s proposal to rename Herzog Park has attracted much attention. My daily commute brings me through Victoria Quay, York Street, South King Street and South Anne Street.
The Government of this “republic” has not yet thought it fit to rename the streets and institutions which honour those who presided over our own history of forced displacement, starvation and subjugation. It is hardly surprising they are content to honour the first Israeli military governor of the occupied West Bank, who implemented similar policies there. – Yours, etc,
CAOIHME Ní MHAOLAÍ,
Baile Átha Cliath 2.
Approved housing bodies
Sir, – Your correspondent Arthur Beelsey’s article on the challenges facing approved housing bodies raises timely and important issues (“There is a seismic change looming; Social housing bodies under increasing scrutiny,” Home News, November 29th).
What must never be forgotten, however, is that since the retreat of the State from the provision of social housing in the 1980s, through the Celtic Tiger years and the subsequent boom and bust which followed, the burden of social housing provision was carried in a significant way by voluntary organisations led by volunteer directors addressing unmet local and national need.
Some of these organisations did grow into substantial housing providers with significant resources. However, many hundreds of small housing provider organisations struggled, and continue to struggle, with the wide ranging and ongoing regulatory, financial, governance and building maintenance and management challenges which the State, through its own strategies, walked away from.
In any assessment of where we are and how we’ve got here, that huge, often unseen and altruistic contribution should not be overlooked. – Yours, etc,
Dr PAUL ARMSTRONG,
Habinteg Housing Ireland,
Lifford,
Co Donegal.
Trump’s ‘peace plan’
Sir, – Lara Marlowe’s statement (“The Ukrainian ‘peace plan’ was designed by Russia for Russia”, Opinion, November 29th) that in “a normal country, Donald Trump ... would be tried for treason” rather ignores the fact that Trump is American and that there is nothing remotely treasonous about an American’s proposing to Russia a plan for ending the war that Russia might just possibly accept.
An end to the war would suit United States and it would suit the rest of the world – none, in fact, more so than the population of Ukraine. If he were Ukrainian he would certainly be tried for treason and almost as surely be convicted since the Kyiv regime is desperate to continue the war for as long as possible and has sufficient control of the courts to punish anyone trying to end it.
Russia has made it very clear what it is trying to achieve and that it is not prepared to fail to achieve its objectives. It is also winning the war and there is nothing – other than destroying the world by starting a third World War – that the West can do to prevent that. There is certainly nothing Ukraine can do.
Proposing a peace plan that did not largely meet Russia’s objectives would be pointless and merely guarantee a continuation of the death and destruction until the Ukrainian army and state had so completely collapsed that they would be obliged to accept the far harsher terms that Russia would impose at that point. – Yours, etc.
WILLIAM HUNT,
Ranelagh,
Dublin 6.
Rugby’s troubles
Sir, – Our defeat to South Africa has sent our rugby pundits into a “deep dive” of business jargon. In recent articles we’ve had talk of a PR campaign, preset solutions, incremental gains, blue-sky thinking as well as the ever-present learnings and processes. At times, it’s hard to know whether they’re talking about a sport or a mergers and acquisitions transaction.
Is it any wonder the game is accused of being a bit corporate? – Yours, etc.
REAMONN O’LUAN,
Churchtown,
Dublin 14.
Vodafone’s Christmas advert
Sir, – What a pity Vodafone has again recycled its Christmas Day swim video advert as it delivers the wrong message about safety on the road and in the sea. The video begins with an elderly gent collecting his friend, Frank, for the Christmas swim at the Forty Foot in Dublin. As the driver reverses on to a busy road, he is distracted by Frank, who is on a video call to his granddaughter, Hannah in Asia. The Road Safety Authority’s appeal to stay off the mobile phone while driving seems to count for nought for a giddy Frank.
At the swim location, Frank puts the phone around his neck in a transparent waterproof pouch. He plunges headlong into the choppy, deep, and freezing sea and, on resurfacing, continues the video call with Hannah. This bit of showboating requires him to hold the phone in his hand in rough water while inquiring “are you still with me?” It leaves Frank vulnerable to cold shock, hypothermia and at risk of being swept out to sea.
As a seasoned Christmas Day and year-round sea swimmer, I love the atmosphere at the festive dip in Fenit. Mobile phones galore are busy recording the build-up and the swim itself. Nevertheless, swimmers need to be vigilant and careful in the sea. It’s imperative to abide by the safety guidelines of Water Safety Ireland to get in, get down, get out and get warm quickly. Leave the video recording to those on dry land.
The “Joy of Connection” advert is festive but Vodafone should be more supportive of the campaigns for safety on the road and in the sea. – Yours, etc.
BILLY RYLE,
Spa,
Tralee,
Co Kerry.
