New RPZ rules mean you'll soon be paying even more rent. That's the whole point
It's amazing how the Government can oversee a decade-long housing crisis and still pretend they want to solve it. They engineered it, created it and take active steps to ensure it keeps on going.
Look at the rush to restrict rent caps, the only measure preventing total housing chaos.
Yet this reckless intervention is being framed as a national rollout of protections for renters - the exact opposite of what it is.
They're calling it a 'reform' of the Rent Pressure Zones, which were reluctantly brought in in 2016 and only after runaway rents had reached a peak.
Limiting rents to a 2 per cent annual hike was absolutely necessary to stop the greed.
But these changes to RPZs will leave it toothless, and pile more pain on renters. The express purpose is to make rents higher so the market is "attractive" to investors. The only thing investors find attractive is money.
Now, tenants are trapped into higher rents on both sides - forced to pay more if they stay long-term in the same place, or, if they move to a new place. Do I stay or do I go? Either way, you'll be stiffed for the highest rent possible.
Landlords will be able to 'reset' rents after six years for sitting tenants; and they can reset them too, for new tenants.
Government is determined to make the market more profitable for the investors they bend over for. This is being done on the backs of renters already stuck paying extortionate average rents of €2,000 nationally and €2,500 in cities.
The reform - rushed into legislation on Friday - will ensure more rent hikes, sparking ever-upwards market rates.
Sinn Fein's Eoin O Broin described it as "the deathknell of rent pressure zones as we know them'.
The reason it's being done is to drive rents up. Taoiseach Micheal Martin and Housing Minister James Browne have stated this. They want an Ireland of higher rents.
Martin said it was about enabling a 'stable environment in which to invest'. James Browne said: "Rents may go up." May? Will. If they don't go up, the investors won't invest.
Our leaders claim it will be more costly in the short term, but lead to more supply in the long term. What use is that to tenants? That's punishing renters to pander to investors.
It's also an empty pledge, as such investors deliver small volumes of very expensive rental in affluent parts of Dublin and Cork - helping just the chosen few.
It goes against the Housing Commission advice, which recommended RPZs stay in place while an alternative system of rent controls is formulated.
The Central Bank's Robert Kelly said the changes will 'be painful for renters'.
He said: 'It's likely to be positive in terms of the level of supply, as they have rent resets within them. But the pain felt by households is not even, due to the housing crisis'.
Good news for the investor - bad news for the renter.
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Mike Allen from Focus Ireland called it 'a solution that says 'we can deliver more housing, but you won't be able to afford to live in it'. That's not a solution.'
I was at the Raise the Roof rally outside the Dail on Tuesday. I've been attending such protests since 2015, usually with my son Luc and his friend Filip. I've seen them grow from little boys into young men, over the time.
They're now taller than Eoin O Broin, who they first met at these protests when they were six or seven.
And yet it is still going on. Childhoods continue to be lost to it. This latest move makes it clear the crisis is actually profit-driven policy.
At the rally, Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald said they had gathered at the rally to call out the Government's "spoof and outright lies".
TD Paul Murphy correctly called it a 'manufactured crisis' that 'transfers wealth from workers to a tiny few at the top, the corporate landlords and developers'.
Deputy Rory Hearne said it is 'clearly government policy to have a permanent housing crisis'.
For a government to do that to its own people is, in my view, tantamount to treason.
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