There is much to unpick in the unravelling of the career — or one of the careers, at any rate — of Robert Troy, a politician apparently convinced his biggest offence was simply having too much on his plate. In fairness, who hasn’t made “genuine errors and human errors” and “not intentional errors” and errors which are “directly or indirectly” of our “own making”, while juggling our portfolio of 11 properties, along with a day job that demands up to 70 hours a week?
Unfortunately for Troy, not too many of us can relate to that particular struggle. I’m sure he’ll have found a more sympathetic audience among his Oireachtas colleagues. Because while the current Government has no desire to be a landlord, many individual politicians have no such qualms. Seventy-seven TDs and Senators are either landlords, landowners or both. This week they got themselves an unwitting poster boy.
Announcing his resignation as minister of State, Troy illustrated exactly why it is a problem that more than one in three parliamentarians are landlords, compared with only three per cent of the general population. It means they are out of touch on the single most pressing social issue of the day. Troy demonstrated this when he declared, “I am not a person of privilege”, proudly pointing out that he had bought his first house at 20. “I have worked for all I have.”
But entering adulthood at a time when getting a mortgage was as easy as stepping in dog excrement is a privilege. Having come of age during a property boom is not down to hard work, fiendish cunning or moral deserving, whatever some over-40s like to claim. It is blind good luck. It is the very definition of privilege.
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Opposition suggestions that if all the private landlords were to vacate the market the Government could simply step in and buy their properties, leaving the tenants in situ, are fanciful, if not unconstitutional
I also got my first mortgage at 20 before I’d even finished university — not because of any special talent on my part, but because my now-husband and I had pulses, and some glimmer of possible future earning potential. In those days, that was all it took.
As the wagons circled this week, Taoiseach Micheál Martin and Tánaiste Leo Varadkar gamely tried to focus on Troy’s “commitment”, “hard work” and “efficiency”. But if they imagined for a moment that would mollify the public, they’re guilty of such fantastical thinking that we can expect the next election to be fought with dragonglass and a Valyrian-steel dagger.
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A story which so perfectly encapsulated what the Opposition has been claiming — that housing and rental policy is being tailored to appease landlords, developers, speculators and investors, rather than people who need somewhere to live — was not going to simply blow over. Not in August; not at any time of the year. Especially not during a housing crisis. Especially not during the week in which thousands of students were choosing between either sleeping in their car or spending half their waking hours commuting to college in it.
All of that said, Troy was right about one thing. Beneath the incredulity and justifiable outrage, there was an unmistakable whiff of something else in the air — the glee at another chance to give small landlords a kicking. But we should be wary of vilifying them; not because of tenuous claims Troy and his ilk might make about how hard they work, but because we need them.
When the Taoiseach claimed over the summer that “there would be no landlords left in Ireland” if the Opposition’s rent reduction bill went ahead, TD Paul Murphy responded with a childish, “Taoiseach, don’t threaten us with a good time.”
Such snappy ripostes may win votes, but they ignore the reality that if life becomes more difficult for small landlords, it will become much more difficult for tenants. The majority of private landlords own just one rental property and most of those earn less than €10,000 a year. If they all decide it’s not worth it — that it’s too onerous, risky, expensive or socially unacceptable — they’ll sell up. They are already doing so in alarming numbers. Almost 3,000 notices of termination were given to tenants in the first half of 2022, compared with more than 1,800 at the end of 2021. More than half of these were because the landlords were selling.
Troy was never going to survive as minister after he became a receptacle for generalised anxiety about the housing crisis and the policies that have led us here
Opposition suggestions that if all the private landlords were to vacate the market the Government could simply step in and buy their properties, leaving the tenants in situ, are fanciful, if not unconstitutional. Right now there is only one ready alternative landlord out there, and it is the big, buy-to-rent investor. This is why one of the main players in the Irish market, Kennedy Wilson, was able to reassure investors on a recent earnings call that “for new product ... that we’re rolling off the assembly line” in Dublin (read: homes that we’re building), “those market rents will just continue increasing ... those rents will go above business plan”.
Robert Troy is right. Small landlords shouldn’t be seen as the enemy. But, by then, no one was listening to him. He was never going to survive as minister after he became a receptacle for generalised anxiety about the housing crisis and the policies that have led us here — “here” being a place where homes are a “product” for investors to salivate over and where 35 per cent of parliamentarians are landlords.
Of all the mistakes he made, the most politically unforgivable was not being able to see that owning one property in this climate is a privilege — never mind owning 11 of them; never mind when you’re a junior minister in the midst of a housing crisis.
The fact that the Taoiseach and the Tánaiste were so slow to identify where the slow-burning sense of public anger was leading, or the reasons behind it, should alarm their political parties.