Eviction ban points up central housing bugbear – a chronic shortage of homes

John Downing

Housing Minister Darragh O’Brien speaks at Government Buildings in Dublin, following a conference with housing stakeholders. Photo: Niall Carson

Pádraig Cahill performing on St Patrick’s Street, Cork, in support of The Big Busk for Focus Ireland. Focus Ireland is sending out an appeal to Cork residents to join the cause and help raise vital funds for homelessness. Photo: Daragh Mc Sweeney/Provision

Housing Minister Darragh O’Brien speaks at Government Buildings in Dublin, following a conference with housing stakeholders. Photo: Niall Carson

Pádraig Cahill performing on St Patrick’s Street, Cork, in support of The Big Busk for Focus Ireland. Focus Ireland is sending out an appeal to Cork residents to join the cause and help raise vital funds for homelessness. Photo: Daragh Mc Sweeney/Provision

Housing Minister Darragh O’Brien speaks at Government Buildings in Dublin, following a conference with housing stakeholders. Photo: Niall Carson

March 08 2023 02:30 AM

So we face into the poisoned politics of eviction – that most emotive word in the Irish political and historical lexicon.

For the Opposition, it is a bonanza, again allowing it to be totally right about all that is wrong in our messed-up housing market.

And it is a lose-and-lose situation for the Government, as it tries to explain the realpolitik of the multiple shades of grey surrounding this high-octane topic. Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, who has to front up ending a seasonal ban put in place last autumn by his Fianna Fáil predecessor Micheál Martin, has wistfully admitted that, even though ending the ban is right at this point, it is also hard to defend.

For the Fine Gael leader, there are three justifications for ending the ban on evictions from April 1 for reasons other than refusing to pay rent. First is that the ban has not curbed the rise in homelessness numbers.

Second is that people returning to Ireland cannot access their own property.

And third is the number of rental places is falling because of landlords exiting the market.

The third reason is surely the most potent.

There is a view among lawyers that, while a temporary eviction ban could withstand court challenges, a longer-term ban may well be struck down by the judges.

Both bigger parties in the Coalition have an uneasy partnership about the entire difficulty of housing which is rooted in the chronic shortage of supply of new homes.

Fine Gael TDs are miffed by a recurring Fianna Fáil tendency to repeat that its big coalition partner has been in charge of housing for almost 10 of the last 12 years. It has especially questioned the record of former Fine Gael housing ministers, Simon Coveney and Eoghan Murphy, the latter of whom has since exited politics.

It all made Fine Gael talk, at the switch-over of Taoiseach and Tánaiste’s offices last December, about a more radical gee-up for Fianna Fáil’s current Housing Minister Darragh O’Brien, in office since June 2020. For Fine Gael, Mr O’Brien’s “Housing for All” pledge – announced to great fanfare in September 2021 – is hit by the price spiral of building materials and rising interest rates, pushing big investors out of home construction.

Leadership of the third coalition partner, the Green Party, decided not to perish upon the hill of this complex political issue. But that acquiescence with Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael has again mobilised the “Green awkward squad” of Neasa Hourigan and Patrick Costello in opposition to ending the ban.

Luckily, for party leader Eamon Ryan, there will not be a Dáil vote for the dissidents to refuse. Yet this is again dissent which could be done without.

The latest announcement will not help renters’ continued flood of anxieties. They will have fretfully noted Sinn Féin’s warning that it will mean children sleeping in garda stations. Meanwhile, the newly minted Social Democrats leader Holly Cairns spoke of thousands more condemned to homelessness.

It remains to be seen whether government promises of mitigating factors hold good at a time when homelessness campaigner Fr Peter McVerry points to a record 11,700 people depending on emergency accommodation with real figures perhaps some multiples of that. We know roughly a third of those homeless people are children, and it is no environment for a child to grow up in.

We must wait and see how Mr Varadkar’s promise to buy some 1,500 homes from landlords pans out. Equally, he has promised to lease an extra 1,000 social housing units.

The other factor aimed at softening the blow – imitating a French practice of obliging exiting landlords to give first purchase refusal to sitting tenants – is likely to be marginal given property prices and mortgage restriction rules.

The real irony may well be that landlords, especially one-property accidental landlords, will continue to exit the market in increasing numbers when this ban is lifted. As construction inflation continues to rise, and institutional investors find more attractive options other than property, there is real fear that private rental and build-to-sell schemes will be at least delayed.

These factors militate against the sustained supply of new properties for rent and sale in 2024 and 2025. After a relatively good year in 2022, there are fears in government about the sustained meeting of its Housing for All targets.

The eviction decision appears to have been rather inevitable. But it compounds the growing heaps of difficulties facing Mr O’Brien. The big question is whether local authorities, or some other state body, can step in to complete the many planning permissions which are currently lying idle and not acted upon. That would help tackle the central issue.