LAST UPDATE | 18 hrs ago

I DON’T THINK the Government has a clue how just how crazy high rents are in this country and how hard it is to rent or buy a home. Just look on Daft.ie and you can see how truly outrageously high rents are. €3,100 for a one bed apartment in Dublin — yes, you read that right. That’s €37,300 a year to rent a one bed room apartment.

If you are a nurse or a teacher or anyone on any sort of average income – your entire take home pay couldn’t cover that rent. It’s not just Dublin – rents for a one bed apartment in Cork are €2,000 a month, in Limerick they are €2,800 for a two bed roomed apartment. How are families, workers, or students supposed to cover rising costs of food, energy, heating and these astronomical rents, which are only going to get higher if the Government has its way in the coming weeks? The Government plans to ram through legislation that will remove rent caps on new tenancies and allow landlords to increase rents to these unaffordable ‘market rents’.

The Minister for Housing, James Browne, and Taoiseach Micheál Martin said in the Dáil yesterday that the new rental measures will bring ‘certainty and security’ for renters. The only certainty the new measures will bring is the certainty of even higher rents, a worsening cost of living crisis for renters and ongoing evictions, increasing homelessness.

The big change is that landlords will be able to reset rents to the ‘market’ rent between tenancies (when a tenant leaves voluntarily) and again every six years in new tenancies created after 1 March. Currently, there is an annual rent cap of two per cent, even when a tenant leaves.

Landlords will massively increase rents for properties being re-rented, and then every six years, renters will face the nightmare of their rent being brought up to the ‘market rent’. It shows how out of touch this Fianna Fáil-Fine Gael Government is with the reality of people’s lives. They think it is a good policy decision to allow rents to rise even higher in........

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