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AS IF A rainy February Sunday couldn’t get any more depressing, Taoiseach Micheál Martin struck the fear of God into the nation’s renters recently in an interview on RTÉ’s This Week.
He signalled a potential end to Rent Pressure Zones (RPZs) ahead of their December 2025 expiration date. There has since been much political flip-flopping on the matter, but his remarks were enough to rattle all of us living on the rental side of the tracks. The comment sparked immediate backlash from opposition parties, housing organisations, and not least, my friends across various WhatsApp groups.
I have written before about the dire state of the rental market in Ireland, and it is with a heightened sense of anxiety that I revisit this topic.
Myself and my boyfriend are currently searching for an apartment in Dublin. If we find one (and that’s a monumental ‘if’), it will be my 17th rental property since I left home for college in Galway at the age of 19.
Given my extensive personal experience of the housing crisis over a decade and in two different counties, I feel compelled to write about the harsh realities of renting. As far as I see it, the four key issues facing renters in Dublin and Ireland related to rental housing are: price, supply, quality and stability.
Let’s kick off with price. The main thing about renting in Dublin, or anywhere in Ireland, is that you will almost certainly be ripped off. In Dublin, a small one-bed apartment typically costs between €1600-€2100 p/m. A studio apartment (breakfast can be cooked and eaten in bed simultaneously, so close are the quarters), go for €900-€1,700.
A room in a sharehouse (three or more people) will cost anywhere from €700-€1200. A 3- or a 4-bed anywhere in Dublin will set you back about €2,500-€4,000 or more. An even harder pill to swallow is that those rents are for “second-hand” properties, while the much-lauded new developments are roughly 30% more than the figures above. With the Irish median wage sitting at €45,000, you do not need a degree in Economics to know this is not affordable for people on, or below that salary.
The second issue is supply. You may be looking at the above prices and struggling to make sense of why a couple would pay €2,100 for a one-bed when there is a chance that they could find something for €1,600. The short answer is that supply is extremely scarce. A search online of studio, 1-, and 2-bed apartments costing less than €2000p/m will typically yield about 120 listings for all of Dublin.
At all times, you have thousands of increasingly disheartened people firing off emails and messages, begging to view any of those properties. In the month or so that my boyfriend and I have been house-hunting, we have adapted to the changing needs of a volatile market, which sounds like something a landlord would text you when they’re raising your rent. Rental supplies are so limited in Ireland that you must follow a relentless and demoralising regime when looking for the “opportunity” to give your hard-earned money to someone wealthier than you.
Firstly, you must enable website email notifications, so that you are alerted in real-time when a property becomes available. Secondly, you must send an email within one minute of this listing going live on the website — if you don’t, your message will be lost in the recipient’s swelling inbox. Thirdly, you must bookmark the website of every estate agent’s website in Dublin and check these every two minutes, because some properties aren’t advertised on the property search websites.
You must also follow every estate agent on Instagram and check those all the time as well because some estate agents only advertise properties there now. Finally, you must post a humorous yet sufficiently desperate Instagram story every week in the hope that a mutual friend is emigrating and/or leaving their apartment. And even then, when your phone is sending you warning notifications about your screen time (“You have spent 14 hours this week on property search, this is the same as the previous four weeks”), you may not even secure a single viewing.
The third infuriating factor about renting in general is the poor quality of many of the ‘second-hand’ properties. Almost every renter has a story (or multiple) about an absolute kip they’ve lived in or live in now. Broken appliances, furniture from the sixties and smelling like it, mattresses with springs hanging out, and of course, the legendary rental house mould. These are all common features of a rental unless you struck gold and have a diligent and fair landlord, which these days are about as rare as a €5 pint.
The fourth significant issue that renters face is a lack of security. Stability is very shaky in rental properties. RPZs provide a bare modicum of price stability to renters that have in practice, abysmal security of tenure. Even if you are a dutifully paying tenant, your landlord can serve you a Notice to Quit anyway because they want you out; whether they are selling up, moving family members in or something more nefarious. What happens when you spot the property you just vacated up for rent online for double or triple the rent you paid? You can make a complaint to the Residential Tenancies Board (RTB), but unless you can substantially prove the price hike, there’s nothing that can be done.
When I was younger, I naïvely thought that the Government, generally, cared about the little guy more than they cared about big money interests and property lobbyists. After more than a decade of a housing crisis that spirals into the abyss, and endless broken promises that the government will sort it out, I fear that Government politicians are more easily persuaded by lobby groups than they are by the future of Ireland’s renters.
Housing in this country has been commodified to the point where we now exist within this dysfunctional ecosystem. Whenever this is questioned or tackled with regulation, it appears that lobby groups, Government politicians and corporate media will quickly respond with a sense of panic. Stern warnings are issued that landlords are essential and that without them, the rental market will collapse. Similar admonishments have been made by lobbyists about RPZs, or really, any measure that vaguely protects renters from exploitation.
The Taoiseach’s comments about RPZs were welcomed by landlord bodies. The influential landlord lobby groups in this country have the political and financial capital to catch the ear of government TDs, ministers and policymakers. I can’t help but feel then that they all see renters not as people with dreams, lives, friends, families and jobs, but rather, as assets who are then hung out to dry.
Over the past few years, the power of this sector has secured the end of the no-fault eviction ban, received €160m worth of tax cuts, and now possibly ended the RPZs. All things considered, it is a great time in Ireland to be a landlord or property investor; you have an abundance of potential tenants to choose from: they are resigned to extremely high prices, they have low standards, and above all, they are desperate.
So why, then, are we constantly told that landlords are leaving the market in droves? Well, that depends on who you ask and who they represent. There is no all-encompassing database by which we can track what happens to a house after it is sold — the Property Price Register only goes so far.
If a landlord puts a house on the market, and another landlord buys it, and rents it out cash-in-hand as an unregistered landlord, the number of landlords hasn’t changed. However, the RTB will be none-the-wiser and will record a decrease of one tenancy. This may also transpire if a property is left vacant after purchase, or perhaps that house was bought by someone who intends to live there (the most positive outcome).
The important question is: do landlords increase supply? An October 2024 report from the Department of Finance noted that “Analysis undertaken by the Review Team indicates that there was almost no delivery of new houses by large landlords for private rental outside the Greater Dublin area in recent years”.
And so, previous and current governments rush to give tax breaks and other incentives to investment funds and smaller landlords, placate renters by throwing a few bob at them before a general election, and cross their fingers that the private market will step in and step up, even though there is scant evidence that they will.
Investment funds and landlords are always going to follow the path of maximum profits — after all, that is the sole function of an investment. Renting in 2025 is beyond a crisis, it is an incredibly expensive, stressful and insecure way to live.
Will this new government work towards vindication? Based on the previous ten years and recent pronouncements by Michéal Martin — I think I know the answer.
Sylvia Power is a 29-year-old editor who lives and works in Dublin.
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