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38 February/March 2024 February/March 2024 PB
Finance Act (2001). This allows for tax relief of up
to €14,000 per year for home owners renting
spare rooms to student and non-students alike.
For students this is commonly referred to as Digs
accommodation.
There’s no obligation on the owner to seek this
generous tax subsidy. If Minister Harris wanted a
new approach, he could have taken meaningful
action to address what has become the Wild West
of the rental sector.
Those in this type of accommodation have no
basic rights of privacy (e.g. to a lock on bedroom
door), no clearcut right to use of facilities
(bathroom, kitchen, etc), no access to the
Residential Tenancies Board (for dispute
resolution), none of the protections a orded in
rent pressure zones (meagre as they are), and so
on. If Minister Harris is genuinely seeking a new
departure Sinn Féin have a forthcoming bill on
regulating this part of the sector which he should
support.
As to point (2), a grant for universities
repurposing vacant/derelict buildings, Harris
was forced to concede at the Oireachtas
Education Committee on 24 January that he didn’t
know how many vacant buildings the universities
had or how many beds could be provided by
repurposing. It was clear that he hadn’t done his
homework. Seven universities have now
confi rmed that they have no vacant buildings for
such purposes, with just one (the University of
Galway) having one building — that could fi t
around 80 beds. It’s paltry. The universities were
not made aware of the repurposing grant in
advance and no details have been released.
However, there is — perhaps inevitably — his not
dissimilar announcement in 2022, also setting
out a capital grant “to allow for repurposing” of
vacant buildings. The latest announcement
seems to be a tweaking or enhancement of an
existing measure,
Certainly repurposing existing buildings is
cheaper than constructing new ones. So let’s
suppose the universities have large numbers of
undeclared buildings just sitting idle.
S
tern-faced and earnest, Minister for
Further and Higher Education Simon
Harris peered down the camera in
early January 2024. As RTÉ reported,
he was bringing “a new Government
policy on student accommodation to Cabinet”. He
had the look of a man who was fi nally going to put
to right the wrongs of the student accommodation
crisis.
This latest announcement seemed to catch
everyone off guard. The universities were
unaware of it. The Oireachtas Education
Committee was not expecting it. And presumably
nor were his Cabinet colleagues, who have so
often been caught out in the past. Minister Harris
had his “I mean business” face on again and was
armed with a new three-point plan.
Unfortunately, as I’ve long noticed this Walter
Mitty face usually means “business as usual” or
“business as we have already announced it” .
Moreover his “new” plans are generally
indistinguishable from his old plans. Cast your
mind back to 2022 when the Irish Independent
was reporting that Minister Harris was seeking
“Cabinet go-ahead” for a new “strategy around
State investment in campus accommodation”.
We’ll deal with the similarities in a moment,
fi rst I want to point out that this is textbook Harris.
It highlights his mastery of the dark art of creative
and economical truth-telling. Big announcements
outline grand designs, which serve to raise
expectations, only to then vanish in a pu of
smoke.
To be fair to him, this approach has in a narrow
sense worked. Of the Ministers in government he
is among the most reported.
His new plan is stated to rest upon three
strategies: (1) accelerating the construction of on
campus accommodation, (2) the repurposing of
vacant/derelict University buildings, and (3)
support for homeowners renting a room to
students.
Let’s deal with each in turn.
Starting in reverse: point (3) is just a
restatement of his support for an existing policy
– the Rent a Room scheme – fi rst introduced in
Simon Harris has a
habit of re-announcing
existing policies
By Cillian Doyle
Let’s also suppose that, unlike with the
Residential Vacant Property Refurbishment
grant, whose uptake has been so poor that the
Department of Housing drafted in Dermot
Bannon to promote it, there is signifi cant uptake.
Under a best-case scenario, a university will
reportedly get €40m. This means that in two to
three years’ time, and at a current construction
cost of €200,000 per bed, it will be able to o er
200 more beds. Considering that we need around
20,000 new beds, and we need them now, this is
essentially irrelevant.
Finally, point (1) proposes accelerating
on-campus accommodation through
Departmental co-funding, but with the proviso
that a “percentage of beds funded by the State
must be o ered to disadvantaged students at a
below market rate”. Not a bad idea but by no
means a new one - since he announced it in 2022.
The Minister must be aware that this “new”
model for providing a ordable rates is an existing
one. For example, it’s the one that DCU is using
as part of the delivery of 400 new beds. Given
that back in March (2023) the Minister made a big
announcement of €40 million in relation this, he
must be deemed to be aware.
Perhaps it slipped his mind. It must be easy to
forget such things when your presentation skills
are so widely lauded the details don’t matter and
you have your eye on a bigger job — the biggest
job.
Cillian Doyle is a political economist and policy
advisor to Sinn Féin
Embharis
Big announcements,
outline grand designs,
which serve to raise
expectations, only to then
vanish in a puff of smoke
I men business
POLITICS
