A Bad Week for Housing Policy and Bad Governing from a Bad Government

• Cabinet dilution of curbs on short-term letting another concession to Lowry–Healy-Rae Independents
• Tánaiste defends Government rushing flawed legislation in a “housing emergency”, despite a year of inaction and last-minute publication of the bill

Labour Leader Ivana Bacik TD has criticised the Government’s harmful housing policies. Speaking in the Dáil earlier today, Deputy Bacik pressed the Tánaiste to concede that avoiding scrutiny had become the Housing Minister’s ‘signature move’.

Deputy Bacik said,
“This has been a bad week for housing policy with the Government inflicting further harm on renters and those unable to buy a home. The Government forced its appalling rent laws through the Dáil. An effective amnesty on rent hikes, already, the proposal has prompted landlords to move collectively to evict tenants around the country. I am dealing with it every day as a local TD. People are desperate.
“The extent to which these new laws will worsen the crisis remains to be seen. Without doubt, people will be forced to pay even higher rents for new tenancies. Instead of confronting those consequences and deliberating on their bill’s impact, the Government blocked debate. They forced the bill through the Dáil after reaching only the ninth of sixty-nine amendments. It wasn’t emergency legislation. It didn’t need to be rushed.
“This has become Minister Browne’s signature move. Last year, debate on four out of four housing bills from his department was guillotined. Not one full report stage debate was taken in the Dáil. Under pressure, he has kicked off this term doing the same again on this highly controversial legislation.
“In his reply to me today, the Tánaiste attempted to justify their guillotine with reference to the urgency of the housing emergency. That defence would be compelling if these proposals did not serve to make things worse. What’s more, these new laws were first mooted a year ago. Yet this bill was not published until recent weeks. It seems that urgency matters, only when it can be invoked to dodge accountability.

“The result is a weak, complicated, damaging new legal framework in an already-broken rental sector. Landlords tell me they don’t understand their new obligations. Renters tell me they don’t know what their rights are anymore.
“Sadly, this isn’t the Government’s only housing failure this week. Cabinet also watered down their short-term letting proposals. These changes are so overdue that it was former Minister Eoghan Murphy who held the Ministry when Fine Gael first purported to be moving on this. Instead of applying the rules to towns of more than 10,000 people, Fine Gael has quietly raised the threshold to 20,000 – a direct concession to the Lowry–Healy-Rae independents.
“Meanwhile, these short-term lets continue to mop up housing supply in our towns and cities with disastrous consequences. The Simon Communities’ Locked Out of the Market report found zero properties available to rent within standard HAP limits in all sixteen areas surveyed. The ESRI has exposed the carnage inflicted on prospective home buyers, as they are driven into a bidding chaos. More than 5000 children are homeless; nearly 17,000 people are in emergency accommodation.
“This Government has had a bad week, but renters, hopeful buyers, families and children in homelessness are having the worst week of all.”