Council tenants allowed rent out rooms for up to €14,000 a year tax-free

This is based on the lazy assumption that social housing tenants don't work when in fact most do. Secondly all LL/licensee arrangements are fundamentally inequitable your problem with this arrangement is that someone of a perceived lower social status will have the upper hand over someone with a perceived higher social status.

This arrangement is no more inequitable than the standard mom & pop landlord arrangement that this country appears to be so fond off where said mom & pop go to the bank get a loan use the banks money to buy property then use the rent to pay off mortgage and achieve a nice profit, then when mortgage is paid sell the asset that the tenant paid for at a nice profit. One is seen as a parasite and the other as an entrepreneur.

Except of course there are no smaller units to move them to.

The Rent a Room scheme has been in place for years, I'm not sure why the existence of a Revenue scheme that's been in place since 2001 has suddenly become 'news'. Or is it the council tenant angle?

"The scheme was introduced in 2001 in an effort to increase the quantity of accommodation available for tenants. It also aims to encourage property owners to declare their rental income to Revenue so tenants can keep their rent relief forms up to date."

https://eldron.ie/rent-room-ireland/

Any homeowner (subject to approval of mortgage lender if they have a mortgage) can take in lodgers and get paid rent of up to €14,000 tax-free per year. Short-term lets (eg: AirBnB etc) aren't covered by the scheme.

Any tenant, whether renting from a private landlord or a local authority, housing association etc, can also take in lodgers and get paid rent of up to €14,000 tax-free per year, as long as their landlord approves. Again, short-term lets aren't covered by the scheme.

What else is news to some people? "Italian explorer 'discovers' new continent across Atlantic in attempt to travel to the Far East"

If the 'news' is that some councils have now decided to allow their tenants to rent out rooms, what do ye expect when rents are through the roof, homelessness is at record levels, there have been feck-all local authority houses or flats built in large numbers for decades*, and a severe shortage of affordable accommodation, either to buy or rent, is one of the most pressing issues facing Ireland, all while we have a government that would sooner cut their own throats than do anything that seriously disrupts the ability of landlords to coin it in?

Isn't anything that increases available rental accommodation a good thing?

*https://www.ucd.ie/geary/static/publications/workingpapers/gearywp201901.pdf

'Financing the Golden Age of Irish Social Housing, 1932-1956 (and the dark ages which followed)'

"The period from the early 1930s to mid-1950s was the golden age of social housing in the Republic of Ireland. During these three decades social housing accounted for 55 per cent of all new housing built and the proportion of Irish households accommodated in this sector increased to an all-time high of 18.6 per cent by 1961. Unlike the rest of Western Europe the expansion of Ireland’s social housing sector did not coincide with a golden age of welfare state expansion. Indeed the Ireland’s social housing sector began to stagnate and contract just as its welfare state commenced a late blossoming in the 1970s. This paper looks to financing arrangements to shed light on these atypical patterns of social housing sector expansion and contraction. The argument offered here is that initially the arrangements used to fund social housing in Ireland were very similar to those used in the other Western European countries which constructed large social housing sectors during the twentieth century. However, as this century wore on, the influence of the socio-political pressures which has constrained the growth of the wider Irish welfare state came to bear on the model used to fund social housing and precipitated the end of its golden age."

"Social housing output accounted for 31 per cent of total housing output during the 1960s and its share of output continued to contract steadily during the decades which followed to 10.8 per cent of output by the 2000s (Department of Housing Planning and Local Government, various years; Department of Local Government, various years). Partially for this reason, the proportion of households accommodated in social housing has declined steadily since the 1960s to 9.7 per cent by 2016 (Central Statistics Office, various years)."

Nothing like as high a proportion of social housing has been built since the late 1950s.

The abolition of domestic rates (a form of local property taxation, scrapped under Jack Lynch's FF government in 1978), and the sell-off of council housing stock under various right-to-buy schemes (introduced in Ireland long before Thatcher turbo-charged it in Britain) both massively reduced local authority revenues, so they couldn't afford to borrow or pay off loans to improve/increase local authority housing stock.

Decades on, Ireland is paying the price with sky-high rents and record levels of homelessness.

And yet this minimal response, which won't hurt, but is still clearly inadequate to significantly increase the supply of rental accommodation, is met with howls of outrage from people who have no clue about how or why Ireland ended up with its current housing crisis.

Wouldn't it be great if once in a while people got their information from well-researched and detailed sources instead of the shock-jock, click-bait purveyors of crap (the Indo/Sindo are among the worst offenders) that infest Ireland's meeja?

If it wasn't for gobshites like these supporting the sell-off of state assets, including local authority houses, in previous decades, for short-term gain (and increasingly obviously these days, long-term pain) Ireland wouldn't be facing a housing crisis anywhere near as severe as the current crisis.

All credit to those posters here who have fallen hook, line and sinker for the outrage or are just outraged on their own initiative.

If you vote, please stop: give people with some sense and discernment a chance to vote in a decent government at the next general election. When it comes to building houses, let's get back to the 1950s baby!

Via Ronan Lyons on Twitter.

Unless and until housing construction rates increase (which is clearly not going to happen if this government is re-elected), even this fairly lame effort to increase the availability of rental accommodation is better than nothing.