All of Eoin Kennedy and his fiancée Aisling O’Donovan’s nightmares are coming at once. They are trying to buy a house while also facing eviction from the home they are currently renting.
The couple now face the prospect of having to find another home to rent, at more than double the cost of what they are paying at the moment, as they step back into the rental market for the first time in 10 years.
The uncertainty of rising rents and scarcity of accommodation means the couple can’t rule out the “nuclear option” of leaving families and friends to emigrate.
For Eoin, a 42-year-old Principal IT Architect, who lives in Douglas in a €1,050-a-month, small two-bed house, the proposed changes to Rent Pressure Zones (RPZs) worry him.
“The landlady wants it (their home) back because she wants to sell it,” he said. “So, after a decade living here, we have to leave. We are lucky our rent was so low, and that gave us a chance to save to buy our first home together.
“Even when we get to rent, as we try to buy, we have no way of knowing how long we will have to rent in the new place. We have to try and stay positive but you could say all our nightmares are coming at us at once.”
He added: “To be honest, after trying to buy or trying to rent, our third option is considering leaving Ireland. We don’t believe the government actually wants us to buy our own home.
“They just want us to be wage slaves, stuck on a merry-go-round of paying very high rent every month and never actually being able to buy our own home.”
He said he knows of properties near where he lives in Douglas being rented out for between €2,600 and €5,000 a month.
He is “gobsmacked” the government wants to attract international investment to effectively kickstart the building of apartments.
“The fact that the government is even talking about attracting or encouraging investors just goes to the heart of what is so wrong,” he said.
“Instead of pandering to investors, the government should be tightening up on Residential Tenancies Board registration requirements on landlords.
“They need to be building far more houses themselves instead of relying so heavily on the private sector. They also need to make things far more secure for tenants, and – for example – reinstate the freeze on no-fault evictions.”
He added: “I feel more hopeless than I ever have before about life in Ireland. We have saved to buy a home, given up on holidays, postponed our wedding and starting a family. But even with us having good jobs, decent money put away, what hope is there for us here if we can’t afford to buy or rent?”