Renters across the country continue to be compelled to share bedrooms with strangers despite calls from housing organisations to introduce legislation that prevents the “warehousing” of tenants.
By Conor O’Carroll
New analysis by Village Magazine of rental listings has found the practice of multiplying the number of occupants in a room remains widespread, forcing many to share rooms with strangers.
Over 100 ads for shared rooms were found across property website Daft.ie and Facebook, including several rooms with two bunk beds crammed together.
Prices for these shared rooms range from €350 a month up to almost €900 in some cases.
One ad features a property in Galway with four rooms filled with multiple beds. For between €600 and €660 a month, it is available five days a week, with the property also listed on Airbnb.
Another property listed for €500 a month in Ballyfermot, Dublin, features a cramped room with two bunk beds and little personal space, while another double bunk-bed room in East Wall for €580 a month is accompanied by the following description: “If you don’t mind sharing a large bunk bedded room with 3 men then this will suit very well” [sic].
Some of the ads were also written in Spanish or Portuguese, specifically targeting international students.
A report from the Irish Council for International Students published late last year found that “almost a third of students studying in higher education share a room with at least one other person”.
A report from the Irish Council for International Students published late last year found that “almost a third of students studying in higher education share a room with at least one other person”.
H, a 22-year-old student at NUIG who wished to remain anonymous, was one of those left with no choice but to share a room. He told Village the search for suitable accommodation was an arduous process, made more difficult when with the number of scams he encountered.
H admitted that he came close to following through with one scam, to the point of sending a copy of his passport before realising all was not right and backing out before he lost any money.
This experience led to H becoming demotivated with the process. He would spend days going through rental listings and dialling numbers looking to find accommodation only to not find anything. And having arrived in Ireland from Dubai without accommodation, he was desperate for anything.
A €720 per month shared room in Knocknacarra, Galway, quickly became his only option. With roughly one metre of personal space for belongings, H was shocked, calling the standard of accommodation for students “a joke”.
Before coming to Ireland, he said he was aware of the housing crisis, but believed it was concentrated in Dublin and wasn’t as bad in Galway. He had initially steered clear of NUIG’s student accommodation options, saying they were charging extortionate amounts for what he described as “like a jail cell”.
However, “that became reasonable when you couldn’t find anything else”, H said.
Two of H’s housemates were even forced to share a double bed, such was the desperation for accommodation. And with 17 other tenants in the house, the shared kitchen quickly became practically unusable.
H said that the cramped conditions in the property meant that there was a high turnover of tenants with many people finding it impossible to cook meals and find space for their personal belongings.
The conditions were made worse by the fact that for the price he paid for the shared room, H said he could get a studio one-bed apartment back in Dubai.
Even with a roof over his head, H told Village that finding other accommodation was not straightforward, particularly with many landlords demanding references. “Being realistic here”, H said, “you come into this country and you can’t really give references for your first rental”.
After a few months of trying H eventually found a room to himself in a converted attic, joking that he now has “at least eight metres of personal space”.
The current rules on overcrowding are to be found in the 1966 Housing Act, stating that a house may be considered overcrowded a) if two people of the opposite sex aged 10-years or older and not living together as a couple sleep in the same room or b) are such that the free air space in any room used as a sleeping apartment, for any person is less than four hundred cubic feet.
Local authorities are responsible for enforcing the legislation and it grants them the power to serve a notice to desist from overcrowding, which if not complied with can result in a fine of €100.
However, this law has previously been criticised as “outdated” and “cumbersome” by local authorities, with the need for far stronger penalties.
Over 40,000 inspections of private rental dwellings took place in 2022, according to last year’s Local Authority Performance Indicator Report, up from just over 17,500 inspections in 2021.
Over 91% of dwellings inspected were found to not be in compliance with minimum standard regulations, though it is unclear how many of these related to overcrowding.
The vast majority of inspections took place in Dublin and Cork, with the respective councils making up over half of the total inspections.
Galway City Council, where H’s accommodation was situated, conducted the least number of inspections of any local authority with just 133.
Responding to the findings, Labour Party leader Ivana Bacik told Village “the fact that so many people are forced to consider sharing a room with a stranger shows just how few homes are available to rent or indeed to buy”, providing “yet more evidence of the Government’s utter failure to deliver on homes for people”.
Following an investigation by RTÉ into cases of serious overcrowding in 2020, the government promised to introduce legislation granting further powers to local authorities to inspect suspected cases, with Minister for Housing Darragh O’Brien acknowledging that “the provisions of the [1966] Act are dated”.
However, the Residential Tenancies Act was amended in 2021 and did not address overcrowding.
A bill before the Dáil since 2018 would update the definition of overcrowding and strengthen the penalties for breaches. However, it has not progressed past committee stage since 2020.
A spokesperson for the Department of Housing told Village “the Department is examining sections 64 and 65 of Housing Act 1966 with a view to strengthening the statutory framework for the enforcement of the overcrowding provisions under Part IV of the Housing Act 1966”.
They also said that €9 million has been made available to local authorities to help them reach private rental inspection targets.
