Faux fury over ending of evictions ban belies cruel truth of housing

ATTACKING the Government over the ending of the eviction ban might play well with the left-wing parties’ voters, but there really isn’t a great deal of actual logic behind all the grandstanding and the faux outrage.

For a start, we’ve been aware since last autumn that the ban had a life span: renters knew it, landlords knew it and politicians knew it, so there’s a distinct whiff of performative indignation about the current row.

The idea of the ban was to provide some security for tenants, at a time of spiralling inflation, over the winter months. But there was neither a suggestion nor a possibility that any such moratorium could be permanent. As for extending it, that might have spiked the opposition parties’ guns for now. It might have played well as a populist gesture, but it wouldn’t have changed the ultimate, inevitable outcome: a seasonal upsurge in heartbreaking stories of homelessness and despair.

The French have been operating a similar ‘winter evictions’ ban for many years, so anybody looking to their experience could have predicted exactly what we could expect this spring. Every year, they’ve had to deal with a glut of evictions as the deferred notices to quit took effect.

And since we were never going to resolve our own homelessness crisis between October 2022 and April 2023, or even April 2024, this was always going to be the situation here too, whenever the ban was lifted.

Because eviction ban or no eviction ban, the root of our housing problem wasn’t going to change: We just haven’t enough houses to meet demand. That’s not the fault of landlords, whether they’re angels or demons, and it’s not the fault of tenants, whether they’re good or bad. It’s the fault of many years of government after government presiding over housing policies that have been short-sighted, clueless, incompetent failures.

It’s estimated that around 2,700 eviction notices will be served once the ban is lifted.

That means 2,700 properties that will be sold, refurbished for sale or further rental, or occupied by the families of the owners.

But these houses are not going to disappear. They’re still going to be accommodating people who need a roof over their heads, perhaps freeing up other properties for rent or sale, or taking someone else out of homelessness.

So we’re basically pitting desperate people against one another in a cruel game of ‘musical chairs’ in which everybody, even those opposition voices shouting ‘shame’, knows there simply isn’t enough capacity in the system. And extending the eviction ban would just mean playing the music and stringing out the scramble for a few months longer.

Until we’ve built more affordable houses, then private landlords will have to be induced to stay in the market: breaching their trust by arbitrarily extending the evictions ban, limiting their rights over their own properties, was only going to discourage new entrants.

I’ve little sympathy for those landlords seeking to increase rents because rising interest rates mean their mortgages aren’t covered – in other words, they want some poor sod of a tenant to buy their houses for them. It is utterly unconscionable that we’ve created a rental culture where investors expect to acquire properties for nothing, on the backs of hard-pressed renters, but that’s another function of our housing policy failures.

The Taoiseach, left, accused the opposition of ‘demonising’ landlords in their rants on the eviction ban, but in fairness some grasping landlords are well-deserving of the opprobrium: just look at the ads for broom cupboards or draughty garden sheds asking thousands of euro a month.

And yet a recent survey of Airbnb owners found that nine out of ten of them would rather leave their properties empty than let them out to full-time tenants.

Their main worry was about tenants’ rights, which won’t have been eased by last week’s Rental Tenancies Board report on complaints received. Tenants refusing to leave, or failing to pay rent, were the biggest gripes for landlords, with one being owed almost €35,000 in unpaid rent.

The nature of the market, though, is that we’ve always had bad eggs on both sides – tenants who don’t pay, or who vandalise or overhold, and landlords who demand exorbitant rates for mouldy shoeboxes, and rent out dangerous or neglected properties.

The only reason they matter so much now – the only reason they can shape and distort the current market – brings us back to the crux of our housing crisis: we simply don’t have enough houses to go around.