The housing crisis in Galway continues to intensify. In late July, there were 234 adults accessing emergency accommodation in Galway, with 66 families, including 165 child dependents, counted in the West region, compared to 225 adults and 154 dependents (including adult dependents ) a month earlier.
Notably, these figures only include those accessing official emergency housing. We know the numbers in precarious housing situations are much higher - whether that's someone staying with family or friends, paying unsustainable amounts in rent, or staying in an unhappy or abusive relationship due to lack of alternatives.
Only last month, Threshold noted the significant increases in rental rates apparent in Daft's most recent report, with minimum wage part-time workers in Galway now paying more than half their wages to rent a single room in a shared house. Threshold's own research shows that 56 per cent of renters do so because they are unable to buy their own home.
Students and the accommodation crisis
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With September arriving, so too do our student neighbours, who are particularly hard hit by this crisis. Insider has encountered far more students than usual who report being simply unable to move to Galway, due to there being no housing available. Long commutes are not new - many of Galway's satellite towns are home to international students in particular, who then find themselves isolated and at the mercy of inadequate public transport options (with the expected consequences for socialisation and mental health ).
The student union at NUIG has reported almost 200 students living in hostels, and while this is not unprecedented, it must not be normalised. There are more than 3,000 students on the waiting lists for NUI Galway's on campus housing (more than the total number of beds in those units ).
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The accommodation crisis is exacerbated by the challenges to mental health of living through a global pandemic - and was not helped by how university management handled planning last year. Students worried about whether to sign leases for rental accommodation in Galway in 2020 were urged to do so - and indeed told to secure seven-day rather than five-day accommodation - a particular challenge when so much of our housing stock has been colonised by short-term rental platforms like AirBnB. When classes were eventually moved online, after students were physically in Galway, students were angry and a mistrust continues to linger.
This year, of course, first year students are not due to arrive until the end of the month, so we can expect this problem to get worse before it gets better. And while I have focused above on the issues facing students - a group that is disproportionately on constrained incomes and reliant on renting - they are just one piece in the housing jigsaw puzzle.
Insider cannot be alone in having had their social media feeds include pleas for housing from parents who are losing their homes, and fear of dropping into homelessness. Meanwhile, direct provision and inadequate housing for the Travelling community are continued stains on our public conscience.
Building is the only answer
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So, if those are the problems, what are the solutions? Build. Build public housing - a message the Government finally seems to be hearing, even if their plans are underwhelming. We need ambition on the scale of the late Labour minister Jim Tully, who built tens of thousands of public housing units in the 1970s - some estimates say 100,000 - in a much poorer country, and with a smaller population.
Build student housing. There is an estimated shortfall of several thousand student beds in Galway. Unfortunately, much of the recent construction in this sector has focused on high-end accommodation, targeted at wealthy students - and leaning into a perception of international students as cash-rich easy marks.
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Insider can attest, from personal experience, that this is generally not the case - and is, in any event, not a sustainable funding model for Irish higher education. Instead, Clare Austick, USI president, has called for HEIs to be provided with funding to build more of their own accommodation.
Building is necessary - and needs to start sooner than later, led by publicly-owned housing stock. However, that is a longer-term solution, which does little to help those in crisis now, or the fact that rental will continue to be a significant part of our housing landscape, not least for students, for most of whom purchase is both unsuitable and unrealistic.
The rental market
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Renters need greater protections - Insider often thinks back to his primary school lessons of Davitt's Three Fs: Fair Rent, Fixity of Tenure, and Free Sale. For a country that so often fetishises its leaders and their pronouncements, the fact that this struggle for economic justice is treated as a merely historical relic - achieved through the Land Acts - rather than the inspiration for a campaign to meet the needs of our present moment, is odd, though perhaps not surprising.
We need fair rents - the continued double-digit inflation in rents for new tenancies, even in rural areas, cannot continue. We need fixity of tenure, and the elimination of the loopholes used by landlords to evict diligent rent-paying families from their homes. We need, as renters, to be able to make our houses our homes.
Labour's Rebecca Moynihan and Ivana Bacik have now produced a Bill to do just that, unveiled at Labour's annual think-in last week. Under this bill, the entire State will be designated a rent pressure zone, limiting increases in rental rates, with limits placed on the level of deposits that can be required from renters. Families will gain the same right that businesses already have to maintain their leases - that is, stay in their homes - if their landlord sells.
The need for a home
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As someone who lost one home when a landlord decided that selling an empty unit would maximise their profit, Insider can confirm the stress and sense of alienation that comes from knowing it could happen again. So too the risk of a distant relative of the landlord being moved in - and you out on the streets - on a whim, or of 'renovations' being used as an excuse to evict you and bump up rents.
We need residents who rent to know that they are secure in their homes. The Labour Bill will not only significantly limit the grounds for terminating a tenancy, it will enshrine a right - already the norm in many other places - to rent a home unfurnished, if one wishes. Too many renters are stuck with cast-off furnishings from lazy landlords, unable to consider making their home truly their own.
'Bread and roses'
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For some, of course, a furnished unit takes some of the stress and expense out of moving - short-term renters like students, for example, may prefer this. However, if renting is going to increase as a long-term model, families must be able to choose their own couches, to have a pet, or to hang a piece of artwork, if they wish.
"We demand bread, but roses too" has been a cry of the labour and women's rights movements for 110 years. Housing is, most obviously, an economic demand, the 'bread' part of that slogan. It is, however, intrinsically bound up in our need for a home, which enables and supports our domestic and cultural life. People need security and a space to make their own - this is why we talk of homelessness, not houselessness; this is why direct provision is such a problem.
"For the people hear us singing, 'Bread and roses, bread and roses." Sing on sisters.
