Following reports that Ireland’s biggest corporate landlord, Ires Reit, plans to move into the housing market in Limerick, local People Before Profit representative Cian Prendiville has reiterated the party’s call for vulture funds to be entirely banned from Ireland’s housing market.
“The cost of rent in Limerick has already gone through the roof, forcing people to leave the city to live and start families. Recent reports that the largest corporate landlord Ires Reit intends buy up homes in Limerick threatens to make Limerick’s already grim housing situation even worse,” the former councillor declared.
“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 and has resulted in apartments left purposefully vacant to drive up rental prices.”
“The most recent Ireland Thinks/Sunday Independent poll showed that 89% of those polled were against companies being allowed to buy up thousands of homes and apartments for rent.
“The vast majority of the Irish people clearly oppose the policy of commodifying our housing stock and selling it off to the highest bidder, 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” Mr Prendeville concluded.
