Will Anyone Acknowledge Ireland’s Rental Pressure Zone Failure?

With 5,405 eviction notices issued in Q3 of 2025, it looks like 2026 is going to be a particularly grim year for renters in Ireland.

The Residential Tenancies Board (RTB) reported a 35% increase in eviction notices being issued over the same period in 2024. Most of these were issued by small landlords who were either selling up and exiting the rental market or renting the property to a family relative.

Either way, thousands of tenants will now find themselves without a home in 2026. A quick search on the property website daft.ie shows that it’s becoming ever more difficult for renters to find a place to rent. The other part of that supply and demand equation means that those who do find a place will pay substantially more.

You can see this rental crisis unfolding in real time when you look at statistics relating to the rental market over the last decade. In 2016, Fine Gael’s Simon Coveney introduced Rent Pressure Zones (RPZs) in a clumsy attempt to control rents in Ireland. Nearly a decade later, it is clear that the policy, far from controlling rents, may have actually helped increase them.

The first thing that can be said about government policy and intervention in Ireland’s rental market over the last decade is that it has failed utterly. This is something that everyone who is renting or trying to rent in Ireland now knows intuitively. That failure is laid out in detail in the above graphic. 

The standout trend from any examination of Ireland’s rental market since 2016 is static or falling rental supply. At the end of 2025, there were 25% fewer private tenancies in Ireland than there were when rent controls were first introduced in 2016. In the intervening years, the population has increased by 13% thereby generating increased demand in a shrinking rental market.

Any Leaving Cert economics student will tell you what happens when demand outstrips supply – prices increase. It is this supply and demand market dynamic that has been pushing up rents. The more the state attempts to control rents through various market interventions, the more supply falls, and rents increase.

Yet, this falling rental supply masks some significant trends. The sell-up and exit from the rental market by mom and pop landlords has in part, been compensated for by the entry of greater numbers of institutional investors and Assisted Housing Bodies (AHB).

This has been viewed by many as an entirely positive trend and a pointer towards a more stable European-type rental market. However, this fails to take note of the fact that institutional investors will typically cherry-pick apartment accommodation in honey pot locations such as the Dublin docklands. 

You’re highly unlikely to find them building in places like Claremorris, Kanturk, and the like, or in disadvantaged parts of Dublin, for that matter. When the mom and pop landlords sell up in places like these, rental accommodation is gone for good. That’s just another side effect of an entirely chaotic and destructive housing policy implemented by various Irish governments over the last decade.

Not surprisingly, the political parties that have presided over this unfolding rental disaster still don’t accept that their policies have failed. As recently as November of 2025, Minister for Housing James Browne was still trying to put a positive spin on things by pointing out that rents in RPZs were increasing at a slower rate than those in non-RPZ areas, which, presumably, was meant to be proof that rent controls are working.

However, this had the ring of an announcement from the bridge of the Titanic about it. The reality is that even tenants in existing tenancies within RPZs are highly vulnerable in the face of falling rental stock. Renting in Ireland has never been more precarious and expensive. This is a direct consequence of a government policy based on rent controls and hyper-regulation implemented over the last decade.

One of the more bizarre outcomes of the current rental crisis is that the government appears to have decided to double down on its own failed rental policies. This now sees the entire country being declared a rent pressure zone although there is no evidence to show that RPZs have actually helped renters. In the same way, minimum 6 year leases being introduced in March, far from protecting renters, appear to have instead triggered a wave of eviction notices for renters.

Ireland’s rental crisis tells us a lot about the current state of politics in Ireland. For the last decade, we have witnessed the bizarre spectacle of so-called parties of the right implementing off-the-shelf housing policies of the left. Not only has this reflected the special position of influence of left-leaning NGOs and housing charities, it has also reflected the general leftwards shift in Ireland’s political landscape.

While it’s hardly surprising that parties like Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil have not admitted their housing policy failures, the real point of interest surely rests around the reaction of the political opposition to this failure. 

In most democracies, the political opposition usually highlights the policy failures of the government. That’s their job, and the great strength of a constitutional democracy is the sight of an effective political opposition calling out the policy failures of the government of the day.

But the dilemma for Ireland’s left-leaning opposition, composed of parties such as Sinn Féin, Labour, Social Democrats, and People Before Profit, is that supposedly centre-right parties like Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil have been dutifully implementing their leftist housing policies over the last decade. And if anyone is still in doubt about that, strict rent controls and hyper-regulation of the rental market are unmistakably policies of the left, not the right.

In recent times, for parties like Sinn Féin, opposition has taken the form of criticising the government’s housing policies, not because they have failed but because they haven’t gone far enough in implementing the failed housing policies of the left. An essential element in this ongoing political pantomime is the obvious failure to plainly state that large-scale market intervention on the part of the state in the rental market has absolutely failed.

However, the people who ultimately end up paying both for the failed housing policies of the state and the dysfunctional political landscape that underpins it are renters. They are now the people who find themselves on the bleak frontline of Ireland’s rental crisis.