Ryanair Snaps Up Almost An Entire Housing Estate In Swords . . . No, We're Not Joking
It has emerged that Ryanair, the biggest low-cost airline in Europe, has snapped up almost an entire housing estate close to its headquarters in Swords, County Dublin, with the company declaring that these homes will be used to house it’s staff.
According to the Business Post, who first broke the story, Ryanair purchased 25 of the 28 homes in the Fosterstown Place scheme, with the company saying,
“Ryanair confirms that it has purchased 25 new-built units in Fosterstown, Swords in order to ensure that it can provide high-quality but affordable rentals close to Dublin Airport for new cabin crew who are joining Ryanair based in Dublin, to help us maintain Ryanair’s flight schedules for up to 33 Dublin aircraft.
Ryanair are a union busting airline notorious for their awful working conditions, with low-rates of pay being the norm for Ryanair’s workers. Now Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary can tie future Ryanair workers to contracts that will leave them vulnerable to homelessness if they dare complain or quit the job.
Bosses like Michael O’Leary have shown time and time again that they have no shame in taking advantage of the housing crisis for their own selfish ends.
An artist’s impression of Fosterstown Place.
Pat McDonagh’s Supermacs has attempted in the past to do what Ryanair has now achieved, with US tech giant Google also declaring their intent to invest in Dublin’s housing market to ‘accommodate their workers’.
The selling off of the majority of the Fosterstown Place scheme to Ryanair comes only weeks after controversy was raised about the selling off of the majority of another North Dublin housing estate to a vulture landlord.
In that instance DWS Group, the €800 billion German asset manager majority controlled by Deutsche Bank, snapped up 46 out of the 54 homes in Belcamp Manor in Balgriffin, North Dublin.
An artist’s impression of Belcamp Manor.
But why do we find ourselves in this mess in the first place? Why are multinational corporations and vulture landlords allowed to snap up nearly entire housing estates in the midst of the worst housing crisis in a generation?
We find ourselves in this appalling situation because successive governments have made the wrong choices in relation to housing. They have chosen to abandon their responsibility to directly provide housing to the people.
Instead, they have chosen to put landlords, land speculators, property developers, bankers, estate agents and other 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. But it does not have to be like this!
It is time for different choices to be made! It is time to prioritise the needs of the people over the greed of the property parasites. It is time to end the reign of the landlords, developers, bankers, landlords and their political fixers. It is time for UP Housing!
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