This article by Eoin Ó Murchú first appeared in Unity, the weekly publication of the Irish Communist Party.
As the housing crisis in the South continues to worsen, and with the private business dominated government unable or unwilling to put forward a rational plan for a solution, attention is turning to the government’s insistence on changing rules and regulations to suit private rental businesses.
Government policy is forcing people out of the house purchase market, and with social house building at farcically low levels, even people with well-paid jobs are forced into the vulture hands of the private renters.
Schemes abound to help these renters, with the government insisting that they are needed to provide housing that the government is “unable” – mar dhea – to provide.
Daily we are regaled with the threat that of we don’t allow rent increases, lower building standards, cramped rental space and so then people will have nowhere to live because the private landlords will “leave the market”.
What is never asked is what would they do with the houses they own if the exited the rental market? They would have to sell them, and that would probably act as a drag on house prices – no bad thing – or they would have to look at them and see their ‘assets’ lose value.
The fact is that the vulture funds and other rental businesses need renters, especially if a socially progressive government were to compulsorily purchase unused potential rental properties at reduced rates. (They threaten us. Why shouldn’t we threaten them?)
Despite the official hype, however, the facts are that there has been no mass exodus from the rental market. Indeed, figures from the Rental Tenancies Board indicate that the number of registered landlords has actually gone up in recent years.
The narrative, pumped out by all the establishment media, is that the lobbying carried out by private rental companies is relay designed to protect the tenants!
It is that pro-tenant measures ultimately harm tenants by disincentivising rental housing supply and maintenance.
And who carries out this lobbying? For example, Irish Institutional Property (IIP), which represents institutionally financed investors in the Irish real estate market, is run by former Fianna Fáil general secretary and senator Pat Farrell.
The Construction Industry Federation was, until recently, run by Tom Parlon, a former Progressive Democrat TD and government minister; while the Banking and Payments Federation of Ireland is run by a former fine Gael minister, Brian Hayes, with Derek Nolana, former Labour TD, picking up the rear on behalf of Airbnb.
As former TDs, these people have unlimited access to Leinster House, to the Dail and to meetings with government ministers and advisers. Publicly, they claim to speak for the ‘small man’, but in fact, being paid by big business they speak and act on behalf of big business.
In this regard, it is untrue to suggest that rental properties are provided in the main by small scale landlords. For example, one of the biggest rental suppliers, Ires Reit, averaged €21,768 rental income for each of its 3,668 units in 2024: that’s just under 80 million euros, €79,845,024, in one year.
Ires Reit is the biggest rental landlord, but large rental companies constitute at least 20% of the total rental market and are at the forefront of rent increases and price gouging.
This is not just an Irish phenomenon. It is a feature of European capitalism in every European country.
In the private rented sector internationally, global investors were enticed back post 2008 by tax-free rental income and the promise of significant profits. As housing for sale and mortgage credit dried up, the private rented sector became the tenure of necessity and grew significantly. Calls for meaningful changes to the sector to allow for it to become a better option for tenants were and are strenuously resisted everywhere.
Instead, the Irish government brings in changes to make things better for the landlords – and to hell with tenants’ rights.
This will not change unless workers, and those at the suffering end of failed housing policies, organise to force an abandonment of the government’s regressive policy of servicing the profit needs of private developers.
That means action. On the streets, through the unions, through communities.
The failure is one of capitalism, and half measures will provide no solution.
We need a root and branch removal of private interests from policy formation in this – and indeed in others – area to counter the lobbying of private profiteers with the facts of failed housing policy on the ground.