Following reports that Ireland’s biggest corporate landlord, buy-to-let giant Ires Reit, plans to move into the housing market in Galway, People Before Profit Galway representative Adrian Curran has reiterated the party’s call for vulture funds to be entirely banned from Ireland’s housing market.
Adrian Curran said: “The cost of rent in Galway has already gone through the roof, forcing people to leave the city for elsewhere to live and start families. Recent reports that leading corporate landlord Ires Reit intends to move into Galway’s housing market threatens to make Galway’s already grim housing situation even worse. The devastating societal impacts of corporate landlords have already been seen in Dublin, where their expansion into the housing market massively contributed to soaring rents. Former Ires Reit chief executive David Ehrlich bluntly told the Irish Times in November 2016 that ‘We’ve never seen rental increases like this in any jurisdiction that we’re aware of’.”
“The vast majority of the Irish people clearly oppose the policy of commodifying our housing stock and selling it off to the highest bidder, which started under Fine Gael and Labour in power and has continued apace under our current government. The latest Ireland Thinks/Sunday Independent poll showed that 89% of those polled were against companies being allowed to buy up thousands of houses and apartments to rent, with only 8% in favour. Yet Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Greens continue to push on with their developer-driven policies regardless.”
“People Before Profit is determined to play our part in building a housing movement capable of stopping the corporate takeover of the Irish housing sector. We need compulsory acquisition and refurbishment of vacant units, reduction of rents to affordable levels with affordability defined as a percentage of income, and the expropriation of corporate landlords into public ownership, a move which voters in Berlin endorsed in a referendum last September. It is intolerable that corporate landlords in this country are allowed to hoard empty luxury apartments biding their time while people are dying on our streets.”
