The Government has opted to reject suggestions from various quarters, including some of its own, that it should establish a fund to allow Irish savers to finance the development of affordable housing for sale. Instead, it’s going to entice international investors to do so. It will just be housing for rent, not sale, and it won’t be affordable for most.
Oblivious to the contradictory position of luring landlords while simultaneously persisting with the fantasy of being parties that support home ownership, Government policy is engineering a decline in people owning their own homes, and a commensurate rise in numbers renting. Hundreds of thousands of households will become poorer, and a small cohort of landlords will become a lot wealthier.
Is this private rental sector into which more and more households are going to be corralled even fit for purpose?
One issue is the fact that there is no deposit protection scheme in Ireland, despite the issue of deposits consistently being the second most common reason for disputes between landlords and tenants. These are schemes run in other countries by private companies or state agencies into which tenants pay their deposits, instead of handing them over to their landlord. The scheme then returns the deposit at the end of the tenancy, if all is well in the interim. Complaints of landlords not returning deposits to tenants drop significantly under such schemes.
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There were 474 applications to the Residential Tenancies Board to resolve disputes about deposit retention in the first three months of 2025 alone. There has been a provision in Irish legislation for the establishment of such a scheme for a decade, but the section of the Residential Tenancies (Amendment) Act 2015 has never been commenced. Last February, People Before Profit TD Paul Murphy introduced a Bill to force the Government to establish the scheme. Nothing has happened since.
There is also no definition of rent in Irish legislation to say what is included or not included under it. This lack of clarity facilitates large landlords in levying – according to recent media reports – up to an extra €200 per month for the use and upkeep of common areas. Common areas are places that tenants do not occupy exclusively and have no control over. In the US, large landlord Greystar (which is also present here) is facing a a class-action lawsuit after the Federal Trade Commission accused the company of imposing hidden “junk” fees, which it denies. The FTC’s lawsuit states that the fees “make it impossible to actually rent from Greystar for the advertised prices”. It accuses the commission of over-reach. Such additional charges allows for circumvention of rent caps.
Regardless of recent Government bluster about increasing security for tenants during the reform of Rent Pressure Zones, the fact remains that tenants of a “small landlord” can face eviction for essentially spurious reasons such as the probably unprovable “personal hardship” of the landlord, or because a member of the landlord’s family might need the property.
The Government’s strategy is that in order for rents for already financially stressed tenants to fall, rents for financially stressed tenants must first be allowed to rise
Most renters in Ireland live a very legally precarious existence, regardless of how good their landlord is. Ireland is an outlier in this regard, compared to many countries with an established rental sector. Rent inflation in Ireland is 39 per cent higher than the European average, and housing costs in general are more than double this average when utility bills are factored in. Those hardest hit by affordability issues also include better-off renters.
According to the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI), in 2023 “middle-to-higher-income renters in Ireland are more likely to face high housing costs than their European counterparts”. Fourteen per cent of the richest Irish renters pay more than 30 per cent of their income on rent, versus 3 per cent on average elsewhere. Sixteen per cent of the next-wealthiest renters pay more than 30 per cent of their income on rent compared to 9 per cent on average elsewhere.
The Government’s strategy is that in order for rents for already financially stressed tenants to fall, rents for financially stressed tenants must first be allowed to rise. High rents will then attract international investment, which will then build apartments for rent, which will then reduce rents across the board.
Ignoring for a moment the significant pain that will be inflicted on all tenants while enacting this strategy of building housing that the majority of renters do not want, recent research from Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies found that the benefits of the construction of new apartments for rent does not find its way down to help those who need affordable rents. Given previous rent inflation, it is highly unlikely rents will fall here in any meaningful way, if at all.
On the regulatory front, local authorities are charged with inspecting private rented sector accommodation to ensure it is safe and compliant with regulations. They each have a target to inspect 25 per cent of the private rented dwellings in their area. In 2023, just nine out of 31 local authorities hit that target (Meath achieved 45 per cent), and nine failed to meet it. Galway City Council managed to inspect less than 3 per cent of the private rented stock in its area. In 2023, 23 local authorities reported that more than 90 per cent of inspected dwellings were found to be non-compliant with the required standards.
There are other concerns: tenancies being misrepresented as less secure licence agreements; landlords wilfully ignoring legal requirements including having to provide their names to tenants; and investigations that take years by an under-resourced RTB.
The fact is that whether renting from the Government’s white knights – international investors – or the traditional small landlord, there are serious issues with the private rented sector that need to be addressed before the State can legitimately expect people to willingly rent a home instead of owning one.
The minuscule proportion of Government politicians who rent (in a country where one in five people in the population generally are in the private rental sector) tells its own story. If more politicians don’t choose to rent long-term, why do they believe so many of us should?
Dr Lorcan Sirr is senior lecturer in housing at the Technological University Dublin
