Sir, – Your editorial on the continuing squeeze in the housing market rightly highlights the relentless rise in house prices and the growing impossibility of home ownership for many (“The housing market squeeze continues”, July 29th). Yet it also reflects a peculiarly Irish assumption – that the only satisfactory outcome is for everyone to own a home.
In many European countries, long-term renting is an accepted and secure way of life because the rental market is deep, stable and attractive to both tenants and investors.
Ireland has moved in precisely the opposite direction. Successive governments, in their understandable desire to protect tenants, have produced a patchwork of rental legislation and taxation that has made private residential investment progressively less attractive.
The predictable result has been the steady exit of landlords, a shrinking rental sector and thousands of households who now feel compelled to buy because renting has become so uncertain.
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That, in turn, piles yet more demand on to an already constrained housing market, pushing prices ever higher. We have spent years treating the symptoms while making the underlying condition worse.
Perhaps the Government should try something genuinely different. Feed every relevant variable – planning, taxation, rental regulation, demographics, infrastructure, finance and construction capacity – into an advanced AI model and ask it to design a coherent housing strategy.
It might produce a more balanced and effective solution than the piecemeal policies of recent years, which have unsettled landlords, failed many tenants and discouraged the very investment needed to build a healthy rental market.
– Yours, etc,
GEOFF SCARGILL,
Bray,
Co Wicklow
