By Jonathan Diebold
Renters in Dublin are being hit with a vicious one-two punch. While the Government attacks those in the private rental market with a rent ‘reform’, which saw an overnight 40% increase in evictions, Dublin City Council is hitting Council and HAP tenants with a blanket rent increase, on average around €100 per month, as of Easter Monday. No doubt other councils will follow suit. This, in the middle of a cost-of-living and fuel crisis.
Imagine you are one of the many people surviving on disability allowance payments below the poverty line. Imagine you are a single parent who has finally found some measure of security for you and your children in a Council home. Imagine you’re a HAP tenant, 60% of whom are living in poverty, ground down under the twin gears of ruthless landlords and uncaring state bureaucracy.
It’s people like this, 70,000 of them in Dublin, who are being hit with this rent increase. A private landlord can only increase rents by 2%, DCC is increasing rents by much more – in some cases as much as 40-60%!
Council’s lies and hypocrisy
Hundreds of council and HAP tenants took to the streets at the end of March to protest these rent increases, in a follow-up to protests which took place at the end of 2025 when these changes were first announced, organised by groups such as CATU (Community Action Tenants’ Union). Nevertheless, Dublin City Council – supported by councillors from Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, Labour, and the Green Party – enacted these changes after narrowly winning a vote last November. A workable counter-motion by PBP councillor Conor Reddy was voted down.
DCC has hypocritically argued that these increases are needed to cover maintenance costs. But the level of maintenance needed is so high because social housing has been neglected for so long. Much of the stock is half a century old and run-down due to the Council’s own lack of maintenance. Tenants have no trust in the Council to invest in maintenance.
There is a lie being spread that this is the first rent increase in 30 years. This is utter nonsense – Council rents increase all the time, they are pegged to household incomes. Rents paid by HAP tenants are skyrocketing alongside all those in the private market. Rather, it is the way that rents are calculated that is being changed.
Militant action needed
Some tenants at the protests remembered the militant social housing rent strike of the 1970s. Its spectre loomed large over the various demonstrations, with the idea of a rent strike being raised by some speakers and attendees.
This was a strike of 35,000 households against rent hikes, which after a three-year campaign won its demands. Similarly, it was a mass non-payment campaign by working-class people which won the water-charges movement of the 2010s. It’s becoming increasingly clear that actions such as these are what’s needed, first and most immediately, to force the Council to back down, but also to challenge the Government and lordlords generally on the housing crisis, and to end the free-market madness they have cultivated.
Solidarity calls for:
- The immediate overturn of these rent increases, and for proper maintenance of council housing, including urgent retrofitting of all homes.
- In the private market, ban evictions; cut and freeze rents at affordable levels.
- A massive programme of constructing social and affordable homes. Take the large construction companies into public ownership and democratic control. Establish a state-owned, not-for-profit construction company using the resources of society to build homes.
- Tenants in the public sector should come together and discuss the prospect of organising a rent strike.
