Continuing to fall far behind housing completion figures promised in the programme for government, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have doubled down on sacrificing renters at the altar of multinational investment funds.
A bill enacted on the first of March allows new tenancies to start at the highest market price. Afterwards, rents can be increased by 2 percent per year (or the full inflation rate for new apartments) and reset to the new market price once the current tenant leaves, or every six years if they remain.
This will have a devastating impact on tenants, who stand to see average monthly rent increase by €249 this year alone. In a situation where only 20 percent of the population can afford to rent an apartment, this will threaten the living situation of hundreds of thousands of people.
Existing tenancies have immediately been put at risk, with landlords incentivised to evict tenants so they can begin a new lease at eye-watering market rates. Recognising this grim opportunity, 32 homes in Bridgetown, Wexford were threatened with eviction, only to have the notices revoked – for now – following overwhelming public outrage. Less than two weeks later, 20 families in one Limerick apartment block received eviction notices. Students, already drowning in costs, typically have shorter tenancies and change more frequently. This means they will face the brunt of higher market rates through every step of their education. What’s more, student-specific accommodation will face rent hikes every three years instead of six.
The biggest landlords and developers can expect to massively increase earnings for their shareholders. Ires Reit, the country’s largest landlord, estimates a 25 percent increase in profits as a direct result of the new laws!
Landlords throw a tantrum
Considering these brazen attacks against tenants, one might expect institutional landlords and developers to be leaping with joy.
Yet like a spoiled brat who didn’t get the exact toy they wanted, they have unleashed a chorus of criticism against the government for not going far enough. They have even threatened the government with legal action against the very flimsy ‘protections’ given to tenants in the bill.
We should add, these protections were only stitched onto an openly anti-renter attack so Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael could pawn it off as a ‘reform’ to minimise the backlash. But they will do nothing to mitigate the disastrous impact of the new bill.
In particular, large landlords, classified as those with four or more properties, can no longer kick a tenant to the curb as long as rent is coming in on time – or at least not legally. Small landlords on the other hand still have generous leeway for carrying out no-fault evictions.
As a result, large landlords now fear the value of their ‘investments’ if they can no longer kick working families onto the streets in order to sell their home.
To be sure, rather than ensuring stability for tenants, these protections create perverse incentives for landlords to make life as difficult as possible for unwanted tenants so they can have them ‘willingly’ end their lease themselves.
The point is that the housing crisis is spiralling out of control with no end in sight. Almost every month a new block of homes is rezoned. Each month rents and house prices continue to rise, while the stock of available homes to rent or buy diminishes.
The government is powerless to stop this, they are at the tender mercies of the housing market and have to make every concession to attract investors to Ireland.
The consequences is that rents will shoot up, but rather than launching into some hypothetical mass construction of housing as the government would like us to think, the landlords will simply collect their higher rents and the familiar spiral of the housing crisis will continue. In fact last year, amid record rents, housing commencements were down over 75 percent.
The sclerosis of the construction sector is tied up in a myriad of factors, not least of which being the profound infrastructural crisis plaguing Ireland. The housing crisis is an inbuilt feature of the general crisis of Irish capitalism. There’s the rub. Squirm as they might, there is no solution on a capitalist basis.
This ‘reform’ will only make the housing crisis worse.
The right to property
The developers threatening to sue the government over the bill have since backed down, concluding it’s easier to just accept their pound of flesh.
But there is precedent for this. In 1981 the Supreme Court already struck down rent controls for violating landlords’ constitutional property rights.
Even Micheál Martin, who hails the current bill as a masterful compromise, argued in 2022 that an eviction moratorium would be unconstitutional!
Truth be told, the developers are correct in saying that their rights to private property are incompatible with decent living conditions and protection from homelessness for hundreds of thousands of working-class families.
Indeed, communists would do away with the inviolability of their private property altogether. In the words of Karl Marx:
“You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society private property is already done away with for nine tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine tenths.”
Nine tenths could today be changed to ninety-nine hundredths. It is that overwhelming majority for which we fight.
