Julia Langneck was full of hope and excitement when she moved from Brazil to Dublin to learn English at 18 years of age.
Within months of arriving in the country she would find herself living in a bedbug-infested bedsit, sharing a room with four other people and paying almost €400 a month for the privilege.
There were eight people sharing one bathroom on the ground floor of the three-storey building on Bolton Street in Dublin’s north inner city. They were allocated one shelf each in a shared fridge, one cupboard each in the kitchen and slept in bunk beds in two separate rooms.
“It was not really human at all; it was really terrible,” says Langneck.
She recalls watching a bedbug crawl across her phone one night, and sleeping in the livingroom for fear of being bitten.
“My two housemates had bruises and bites all over their body, and we had to pay for it to be cleaned,” she says.
When the situation became unbearable, Langneck decided to move out, but her landlord, Renato Passos, withheld her deposit.
She brought a case against him to the Residential Tenancies Board, the rental market regulator and arbiter of landlord-tenant disputes.
The board ordered him to pay the deposit and damages. It would not be the last time he would have dealings with the regulator.
[ Dublin landlord hit with largest-ever RTB fine over failure to register tenanciesOpens in new window ]
Sources within the RTB this week gave The Irish Times an insight into how they investigate rogue landlords and what they have seen vulnerable tenants go through.
Inside the RTB, a team of investigators work like a detective unit to turn tip-offs into tangible prosecutions under powers afforded to it in 2019.
They report a pattern in their findings: landlords with multiple properties, the subdividing of dwellings, overcrowded units and the absence of lease agreements.
They regularly find vulnerable tenants, who have often just arrived in Ireland with no real understanding of their tenancy rights, paying high rents in substandard accommodation and being threatened with eviction or being moved around to different locations with no notice and seemingly no other option.
Part 7A of the Residential Tenancies Act was enacted in 2019 and gives powers to the RTB to investigate improper conduct by landlords.
Under the Act the RTB can appoint “authorised officers” to investigate complaints and gives them extensive powers of entry and search, as well as power to compel people to provide information.
The outcome of the investigation is sent to a “decision maker” within the RTB, who decides if improper conduct has occurred.
A financial sanction can then be imposed on the landlord, and must be confirmed by the Circuit Court. Details of the sanctions – and the landlord who received them – are then published on the RTB website.
Tenants were sleeping on beds on the floor of the bar area of what was once Buck Whaley’s nightclub on Leeson Street
While Langneck’s case was taken through its disputes process, the RTB subsequently began its own independent investigation into Passos when media reports detailed serious overcrowding and unstable tenancies in properties he was leasing on Leeson Street in Dublin 2.
In November 2024 this resulted in the RTB’s largest ever sanction, with the company run by Passos, Sweet Home Accommodation Ltd, being fined €22,000 for a breach of rental laws at six city-centre properties under his control.
Investigators established that he had failed to register 20 tenancies in properties on Leeson Street, Middle Abbey Street and Upper Abbey Street.
During its investigation the RTB discovered Brazilian students were being targeted through language schools and on social media about properties Passos did not actually own but was subletting.
The tenancies were very short term, only a few months in duration, and rents were on average €500 per month.
Tenants were sleeping on beds on the floor of the bar area of what was once Buck Whaley’s nightclub on Leeson Street.
There was extensive overcrowding at this property and at multiple other properties run by Passos, with bunk beds crammed into makeshift apartments, mattresses laid on floors and livingrooms converted into bedrooms. In one property there were 15 people sharing one kitchen.
Investigating this case proved particularly difficult for the RTB because almost all of the tenants had moved out, often back to Brazil, by the time the case started.
Significant time was spent by investigators tracing down these tenants, calling, emailing and chasing them by any means possible to try to get their evidence on the record.
Eventually they gathered enough responses to ground a case, noting the most striking thing about their evidence was that these people did not know they were tenants, nor that the landlord couldn’t move them out in the morning, nor that they were entitled to privacy and space in their own home.
Sweet Home Accommodation Ltd is now in liquidation and the RTB is not aware of any outstanding cases against Passos.
Asked to comment on the investigations, Passos responded to say the company was no longer operating.
While Passos engaged with the RTB investigators and was co-operative in their investigation, other landlords have proven much more difficult to track down.
Serving the notice of investigation on Marc Godart proved particularly difficult
Controversial Luxembourg landlord Marc Godart and his company Green Label Ltd has been issued several sanctions by the RTB, following the conclusion of multiple investigations into his conduct.
The Irish Times has investigated his rental property interests over several years, finding repeated instances of overcrowded accommodation and unlawful evictions in his sprawling Irish rental portfolio.
However, sources within the RTB say that serving the actual notice of investigation on him proved particularly difficult. An investigation cannot continue unless the board can prove this notice was received by the landlord, and so landlords often do their best to evade receiving it.
The first line of defence is often hiding behind multiple different company names, requiring the regulator to trawl through company records to establish the person behind the front.
In Godart’s case, investigators found letters were returned to them because the letterbox of his registered address had been blocked up.
When investigators called to hand over the letter in person, they found the office was on an upper floor of a multi-unit block that they could not access.
In the end, they waited outside the office on five occasions in order to gain trust with those coming and going, who eventually let them in and allowed them to push a letter under the door of the registered address.
The RTB is keen to emphasise its persistence in investigating improper conduct in the rental market, and latest figures show the number of sanctions it is securing is growing at a steady rate.
In 2024 it published 75 sanctions, with a value of just over €238,000. This is almost four times higher than what it gathered in 2023, at €64,360.
Julia Langneck says she is grateful for the investigations into Passos, who she feels made her time in a foreign land far more difficult than it needed to be.
“You feel that someone from your country is going to help you, because you just arrived and everything is hard, but it was totally the opposite,” she says. “He just kind of used us to get money.
“It’s really upsetting, because you think you just crossed the ocean to another country to try a better life, and then you meet someone from your own country, and you think that person is going to help you, but definitely not.”
After six years in Ireland, she returned to Brazil this summer to be with her boyfriend, Deliveroo driver João Ferreira.
Ferreira lost part of his right leg after being seriously injured when he was hit by a Garda vehicle on the M50 in 2023. He is awaiting more surgeries in his home city of São Paulo.
As the couple adapts to the realities of this new life, Langneck reflects on her time in Ireland.
“When people ask me, I say I really love Ireland, but accommodation is such a big issue there. In the end I got a nice apartment, a nice job – after years of worry, I felt like it was worth it in the end.”
