The impact of Airbnb on Galway’s housing crisis has been slammed by People Before Profit’s Galway City Central candidate Adrian Curran.
Curran criticised the city council’s “ineffectual role” in enforcing the existing regulations on Airbnb lets.
A report in February found that Galway city had 509 entire properties for short-term rent, while there were only 40 on Daft.ie.
This is not including Airbnb properties where part of the property was available, which bring the total number of Airbnb properties in Galway up to around 1,000.
“When we canvassed Prospect Hill last week, it was nearly hard to find houses that were actually lived in with the amount of short-term lets in some parts of the area,” said Adrian Curran.
“The vast majority of these are not adhering to planning regulations, illustrating how lax Galway City Council are in enforcing the existing modest rules in place. This has led to the hollowing out of our city in many parts of the city centre, such as St Patrick’s Avenue, where many short-term lets are clustered in close proximity.”
Mr Curran said that the Simon Community reported this week that there were no HAP properties available to rent in Galway city centre or Galway’s suburbs.
He said that HAP is yet another example of billions of euro being siphoned off to private landlords with the result that the housing crisis is getting worse, not better.
“Instead of subsidising these landlords, or major global corporations like Airbnb, whose profiteering extends to maintaining a presence in illegal Israeli settlements in occupied Palestine, we need to invest in public housing on public land to seriously tackle our housing crisis,” said the PBP candidate.
“We need councillors on Galway City Council who are prepared to stand up for workers, students and families and take real action to end Airbnb’s disastrous role in inflaming Galway’s housing crisis.”
