With rents having increased by 8.3 per cent according to the latest Daft.ie report, the Government’s announcement of a two per cent rent increase cap in RPZs is “worse than useless”.
This is the view of People Before Profit Galway representative, Adrian Curran, who said such a cap in Rent Pressure Zones such as Galway city, will prove ineffective given rents are “already at totally unaffordable levels”.
Mr Curran said that only rent controls, with a rent authority empowered to reduce, set, and cap rents can “guarantee affordability” of rents and “address the crisis”.
He declared it “quite shocking” that the Government “does not seem to get the fact” that rents are unaffordable levels. “We need radical and immediate measures to reduce rents,” he said, “and a mechanism to set them and keep them at levels that are actually affordable.”
