Housing U-turn shows true depth of the crisis

World of Politics with Harry McGee

The jury is still out on the pressing question as to whether Liz Truss’s premiership will outlast the fresh lettuce placed on a table by a British red-top last week. She has to serve 73 days more in office if she doesn’t want to be the shortest lived British prime minister of all time.

She has performed more U-turns in the past week than a boy racer with a souped-up Vauxhall doing doughnuts at a crossroads – and that gives us a nice segue to the topic of this week’s column…another U-turn of significant proportions.

This U-turn has happened in Ireland and the man who performed the graceful pirouette was the Minister for Housing Daragh O’Brien.

At Cabinet on Tuesday, O’Brien won approval for a temporary ban on evictions from private rented accommodation – and that represented a huge pivot in policy for the Government.

For the past year it has resisted all calls for any moratorium on evictions on all kinds of grounds. The main ones would be that it would have a chilling effect on landlords who would desert the market in droves. There was also talk of the Constitutional property rights of landlords being affected.

Only last week, Tánaiste Leo Varadkar said that banning evictions during winter would only warehouse the problems until spring when there would be a glut of people being turfed out of their flats and houses when the ban was lifted.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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