Finally Ireland’s housing “crisis” has been exposed for what it is: Government policy.
Maybe after the Robert Troy interview, we’ll be spared the sight and sound of politicians in charge pretending they want to solve it.
This is not some Act of God thrust upon the nation, destroying childhoods and ruining the prospects of a generation.
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On RTE radio yesterday, Troy exposed the rot behind it all.
All I could hear from him were phrases like “my rental interests” and “two letting agencies” and the roll-call of his portfolio of 11 properties.
The Life Of The Landlord Class, by a junior minister from the Midlands, aged 40.
It’s an elite world those of us on the other side cannot fathom. In Ireland’s two-tiered class system, Fianna Fail TD Troy is rentier – the ordinary worker is renter. The renter is locked into high rents, and blocked out of home ownership by the inability to save for a mortgage while trying to pay them.
We have such extortionate rents that the majority of renters – 54% –now need state assistance to pay them, while the likes of Troy counts the cash as it rolls in.
It creates a rental trap for the 46% of those who pay the punishing rates without state assistance. It means the average age of our first time buyer is 42. The outsourcing of social housing to the private landlord is leading directly to families becoming homeless due to insecure accommodation.
Robert Troy is part of our housing system that is rotten to the core.
It’s a national scandal ripping up the social fabric, what President Michael D Higgins called our: “Great, great failure.”
Troy deserves to be fired.
Anything less than radical change to fix housing will see the rest of the current Government kicked out along with him.
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