Deputy Ken O’Flynn (Independent Ireland, Cork North Central) has called for clarity after the Government quietly shelved its rightsizing scheme for older homeowners, and has warned that a larger crisis for older renters is being ignored entirely.
“Older people did the right thing. They put their hand up, they said they were willing to sell and move to something smaller and more manageable, and the Government pulled the ladder up behind them,” Deputy O’Flynn said.
“Councils were told to stop taking applications and nobody was told why. Most local authorities cannot even say how many people are stuck waiting, which tells you the Department has lost grip on this entirely.”
“But there is a second group nobody in Government wants to talk about, and I have raised it repeatedly, first as a city councillor and now as a TD. There are people in this country who lost their homes and their businesses in the 2008 crash, who picked themselves up, went back to work, started trading again and rebuilt their whole lives. They did everything right. Yet because of a debt history from fifteen years ago, the banks will not touch them, and they have never been able to qualify for a mortgage since.”
“Those people are now renting privately, often into their sixties. When they hit 66 and have to step back from work, they will not be able to carry the rents we now see in the Irish market, because the private rental sector has exploded beyond anything reasonable. They will have no choice but to present to their local authority for social housing, at exactly the age they are least able to fight for it. That is a wave of demand heading straight for councils that are already overwhelmed, and the State is walking into it with its eyes closed.”
“You cannot claim to have a plan for housing older people while ignoring a whole generation who were punished once by the crash and are about to be punished again in retirement. I am tabling parliamentary questions this week on the shelved rightsizing scheme, and I am demanding that the forthcoming action plan on housing for older people confront this cohort directly rather than pretend they do not exist. ‘In the coming months’ is not good enough for people who have been waiting over a year, and it is certainly not good enough for people staring down a retirement they cannot afford to house.”