The eviction ban

SF are morons, appealing to the human element of evictions which are horrible considering they have nowhere to go but the damage this ban has caused to landlord confidence is stark. We have kicked the small landlord for so long and they are fed up of it. The irony is SF are kicking up about investment funds buying up the market but an extension of the ban is going to make these funds the dominant landlords who can charge whatever they want with no small scale alternatives.

Entirely predictable. You can't get those 10 years back of building nothing, there saying now we need 100k homes a year, we can't even manage 30k annually. The politics of all this is stopping any progress, this is an absolute crisis of this generation. Government are running around looking for short term solutions without addressing the foundations of a long term change.

Its all demand measures lobbied by the construction industry. Not a single measure to improve supply. A piddling vacant property tax when really they should be taxed into oblivion or sell up.

Most of the builders will be off to rebuild Ukraine when the war is over too. Thats going to take every builder Europe has.

Some of us predicted this would be a damp squib. Can't say I'm surprised by the outcome. Labour got one in before their Easter holliers, SF will be doing the same before their summer holliers. All loud-mouthing from the opposition, nothing new, nothing exciting, nothing innovative.

You know Bacik would have been better off saying she had a definitive plan as to how to build 970,000 houses over ten years, problem for her is that she would then be asked for the plan instead of getting the glib 1 million headline.

The RTE article is brief, but Cowen made a comment comparing an extension of the eviction ban to be like free sweets for children.

For those watching the debate, it was around the context of providing social housing in much larger numbers for social tenants and this caused some on the left to cry shock and horror and accused the minister of being removed from reality.

I happen to agree with Cowen and I hope he doesn't soften his cough, bend the knee and apologise for truly held, economically sound and fair beliefs. We most definitely need more housing, but the huge focus on social housing is little, or no help to people who want to get a mortgage and don't qualify for social housing because they earn a living. The opposition are shamelessly crying wolf on this, despite TDs like Labours Aodhán Ó Riordáin shooting down hundreds of local housing applications, mostly social or heavily mixed social developments.

I think Cowen should stand his ground here and ignore the faux outrage from the opposition. Anyone else have an opinion on this?

I believe there's a three to four thousand evictions that were paused and only about 200 were due to non payment. So the vast majority of people being evicted have paid their rent.

It's a stupid bloody comment, no matter where one stands on the eviction ban. But it's designed to appeal to cunts who want to have this idea in their heads that it's non-payers only that are going to get turfed out onto the streets. A specious state of mind given the fact that it affects, as you point out, renters with no fault in their payment history.

It seems, though, that there are lot of people who a for the lifting of the ban, simply because the "left" in the Dail are in favour of extending it. That's about the extent of their logic on the matter.

Meanwhile, we have a political class that are happy to sit on their hands and continue to watch the nightmare that is our housing situation and do bugger all about it.

What are the permanently outraged going to do when society doesn't collapse following the ending of the eviction ban?

The Chicken Licken antics from the opposition are getting ridiculous at this stage.

How can anyone trust a Cowan. Two ****** absolute total housing disasters in 15 years. You couldn't make it up.

I previously stated the current government is a shambles and a weak one at that. Eviction ban was another in a long list of the government putting there foot in it when it comes to housing. If they were insistent on the eviction ban there should been a tax package for the landlords at the same time. You don't kick a man while he's down.

My other point about SF is they are even more anti landlord and it looks like a matter of when not that they govern and as a landlord I'd be running for the exits now.