How to cure the housing crisis overnight!

Kudos to the excellent notfairbnb campaign

 

Throughout this immoral and appalling Irish housing scandal, nothing has enraged me more than words uttered by our rotated Taoiseach.

 

With his government facing a vote of No Confidence due to their lifting of the Eviction Ban, Maggie Varadkar thought the time was right to dabble in legal pedantics.

 

Ignorant of the obscenity of an Irish leader pontificating the definition of eviction, Varadkar spoke at an EU summit in Brussels.

 

“I think people often mix up termination with evictions.” he said.

 

As I absorbed those words a searing pain, burning and visceral, roared from my core to all parts abdomen.

 

Think what you like, Blueshirt Boy, but know this, you loathsome toe-rag: if you’re a tenant who’s paid their rent every month, done the landlord the service of caring for the property and tending to the garden, when you’re served notice you feel like you’re being evicted.

Because you are.

Even given the fact that Maggie V is a landlord, I was astonished at his absolute inability to empathise; his vile arrogance and shameful ignorance of real life.

He was saying we’re so stupid we don’t even understand which particular way we’re getting fucked out of our homes.

I know very bloody well how desperate and terrifying it feels to be told to leave your home, especially when you’re unable to find another.

 

A tenant since 1981, I’ve never missed a month’s rent. Yet in the last 5 years I’ve been served notice to terminate my fully-registered tenancies twice, and neither time was I in any way at fault.

Five years ago, three months after the collapse of my marriage, my landlady took advantage of the change in circumstances to serve notice on a six year tenancy.

Two years later, in a different county, my next landlord saw fit to serve me notice on the afternoon I found out I was to have half my left lung surgically removed.

After the break-up, the house move and 18 months of severe illness, I had no savings and was about to face a major operation.

Due to Ireland’s woeful lack of housing supply, there was nowhere to move to, and even if I did get lucky and found somewhere, how the hell was I going to pay rent?

Every single night for four months I searched the three major property websites for rentals around Killala, North Mayo, and found nothing. 

Two places were advertised but it proved impossible to get a viewing.

Then I looked at the Airbnb website and saw they had 871 properties available in the general Killala area.

Listen to me, Leo, you vacuous waste of space. Your smug semantics will never succeed in diminishing the dignity of good folk facing eviction.

The truth is as simple as it is tragic: losing your home is losing your home.

The fury I feel towards Varadkar becomes insignificant in comparison to the frustration I feel, as yet again I stare at the overnight solution to our nation’s housing crisis.

January 2023 figures from the Department of Housing show the number of homeless people in Ireland now stands at 11,754 - the highest number of homeless individuals since current records began.

That number translates into 3,431 children belonging to 1,609 homeless families.

Yet just a click of the mouse away, there are 25,515 AirBnB listings in Ireland, 60 per cent of which are entire homes or apartments.

That’s over 15,000 empty homes and apartments in excellent states of repair, ready to be lived in right now.

How can it be right to sacrifice the needs of those who live here to those of tourists?

Of course Ireland needs to profit from tourism, but infinitely more important, its people need somewhere to live.

The simple overnight solution to the Housing Crisis: forget about being slaves to the free market for a second, impose a five year moratorium on all online vacation housing websites, and give homes to the homeless.

If you want a self-catering pad in Ireland, get on the phone. Call up about your cottages, pods, yurts, tepees and penthouses. They’re only a phone call away.

Zero homeless. Completely achievable, if only a couple of rotating capitalists had the cojones to adapt the market in a tiny yet massively significant way.

Airbnb will still enjoy healthy profits without Ireland, and as soon as we’ve cured homelessness, they’ll come running back without a whimper.

Alongside the official homeless there are 290,000 people in Ireland like me, the hidden homeless, living at the grace and generosity of friends or family.

We are lucky in that we have roofs over our heads, but we have no security of tenure, no rights, no future in Ireland’s gleaming.

Until there is a viable supply of homes to rent, we have to stop sacrificing Irish freedoms to corporate forces, stop scaring people out of their homes, and offer hope through the simplest of solutions.


©CharlieAdley
31.03.2023