The end of the eviction ban will no doubt divide opinion between renters and landlords, but its impact will be far reaching either way.
Full details of a budgetary package for both groups are yet to be confirmed, but it will have to be fair to the small, local landlords who have been exiting the market under what they feel are unfavourable circumstances.
There needs to be a fairer system of tax breaks for these smaller and single-property landlords to incentivise them to remain, without conferring the same benefits on big corporate landlords and international investment funds for whom continually spiralling rents are a welcome sight.
For renters, the lifting of the ban means they may be facing a stark reality in the coming weeks. Homeless organisations such as Threshold and Depaul have warned it will lead to an immediate rise in homelessness.
For many tenants, measures such as being given first right of refusal when it comes to purchase is a laughable and derisory gesture; they do not have the necessary deposit secured because of the high rents they’ve been paying for years. In some cases, rents may be in excess of a monthly mortgage payment for the same home.
The eviction ban makes sense if a massive delivery of new housing and rental accommodation was delivered; that simply has not materialised. There remains an insufficient supply of rental housing, especially now to pick up the slack if a new cohort is about to be given notice to quit.
TEST DELAYS
It is unacceptable in a 21st Century healthcare system that thousands of patients in the South-East, including Kilkenny, are waiting months for test results due to a major backlog. Up to 2,000 patients from St Luke’s Hospital are having to wait up months, in some cases, for results.
We need answers on how many test samples were submitted to UHW from here, and patients need assurances that they were/ will be processed as quickly as possible.
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