Tax Breaks For Landlords And Record Child Homelessness - Just Another Week In Darragh O'Brien's World
On the 2nd of January, Housing Minister for the Twenty-Six Counties, Darragh O’Brien, spoke in favour of increasing tax cuts introduced in the last budget to benefit ‘good landlords’, in an effort to keep them from leaving the market. Three days later the so-called Department of Housing released its homelessness figures for the month of November, the report showed that 13,514 people are now without homes, 4,105 of these are children - a new record.
If ever there was a week that showed who the Twenty-Six County government truly prioritise, this is it!
In October last year O’Brien released a statement declaring that “Those without a home remain the top priority for this Government”, a laughable statement coming from a man who has overseen a 55% increase in the number of people living in emergency accommodation since being appointed Minister for Housing in 2020.
Since releasing that statement in October, nearly 350 more people have been made homeless, with O’Brien remaining silent on the issue ever since.
While he has not talked about the homelessness crisis since then, O’Brien has been very vocal on the need to increase already generous tax breaks for landlords declaring that,
“What I really wanted to do was to make sure that the principle of cost reduction for good landlords is actually in place and it is now…you want to make sure you retain good landlords in the market and cost has been a real issue for them.”
Continuing, O’Brien declared his sympathy with landlords who were prevented from increasing rents on their properties as much as they would have liked,
“[Landlords] can’t reset the rent. So even though the house next door, the apartment next door could be €1,500, you can only rent that apartment at 2pc above €800. There are quite a significant amount that are stuck there. That’s a tricky one.”
Developers are also in line to benefit from O’Brien’s generosity with the ‘Housing Minister’ determined to expand the Crói Cónaithe Cities scheme, a venture which gives developers state funds of up to €144,000 per apartment, all part of a plan to build 5,000 apartments by 2026.
Plans have already been approved to build around 500 apartments as part of the venture, with O’Brien saying that he was open to “tweaking” the scheme to see whether money could be forward-funded to developers. In other words, O’Brien wants to funnel resources from those who are income and asset poor, to those who are already income and asset rich.
The Twenty-Six County government have abandoned their responsibility to directly provide housing to the people, they have instead chosen to put landlords, property developers, speculators, bankers, estate agents and other parasitic profiteers in effective control of the housing sector, with predictably disastrous results.
Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, the Labour Party and the Green Party made these choices because they all share a fanatical belief in the private sector and profit-driven market economics.
Darragh O’Brien needs to accept that this market-led approach to housing is making the situation a whole lot worse, not better. A radical shift to a system of Universal Public Housing would start to deliver real results within a couple of years, but more importantly it would give people real hope straight away.
This exploitation is never going to end until the people directly affected by the housing crisis start actively fighting for their own futures by joining the fight for housing justice and For A New Republic.