McDowell "Folly of abolishing bedsits only to promote co-living is now becoming clear"

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BIG-notorious said:
So did slums. So do homeless hostels and hotels serving as emergency accommodation. As in fairness do massive mansions in leafy suburbs occupied by MCDowell and his ilk. Same way drug dealers fill a role in the justice system.
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Any that were slums could have been dealt with. No new ones permitted. It did not have to involve banning them outright without a solid durable basis for meeting the accomodation needs of their occupants.

Comparing them to drug dealers? Absolute nonsense I doubt that even made sense in your own head because it makes none on the page.
 
Young people have it too comfortable these days.
I remember sharing a bedsit in Rathgar... there was frost on the inside of the windows.
We had candles.. if it got too cold, we lit one.
 
elcato said:
This is why they won't be ever coming back. Anyone who is not nearing pension age or outside Rathmines never heard of them and when mentioned are horrified that people once lived in such squalor. This is what happens when you give the childer a bedroom each growing up
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Interestingly some people were shocked ant the idea of co-living.

I imagine they had never experienced house sharing and all that comes with it.

Most likely Dubs who tend to have the luxury of living at home before buying.
 
Banning a type of accommodation is like squeezing a balloon: There has to be a compensatory bulge somewhere else. Be it underneath a bridge or squeezing 70 people into a house, it's often not the outcome that the legislators intended.

A dramatic case study here from the Independent: independent.ie/irish-news/fifteen-people-sharing-one-room-in-house-with-70-tenants/35358798.html
 
faketales said:
I imagine they had never experienced house sharing and all that comes with it.

Most likely Dubs who tend to have the luxury of living at home before buying.
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Hey! Maybe some. But some Dubs on here grew up in a small terraced house 2.4 children and 1 bathroom. Thats a different kind of house sharing...

Ive looked at terraced houses in Dublin which have a small toilet in a WC with sink and bath in an adjacent room.

I could definitely see the pros and cons of a bedsit in Dublin versus a house share, whether thats with family, students or professionals.
 
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As many above, I went to college in Dublin in the 90s and knew loads of people living in bedsits. You can tell by McDowells usual ill informed rubbish that he never in his life set foot in the frozen, damp, bone chilling pneumonia inducing Irish bedsits of rathmines and Drumcondra. House shares near college were infinitely better standards. Implying that threshold wanted actual standards and then wanted co living, mixing up what various departments listening to various vested property developing interests wanted. Never backing anything up with solid facts, just the wealthy point of view of what the poor should be happy with. Most of the conversion of houses was due to gentrification of bedsit land not rules and there are still plenty of very poor standard ‘pre 63’ accommodation outside of Rathmines, Ranelagh and Drumcondra. Just McDowell wouldn’t be aware of any of the areas.
 
DannyBoyD said:
For you or for her?
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For her.
DannyBoyD said:
If your widowed grandparent with a reduced income were to look for accommodation now, how do you think they would fare?
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Badly. But I don't delude myself that she would fair well if bedsits were permitted. The thread already refers to the phenomenon of people paying absurd amounts to live in squalid conditions in overcrowded shared houses. If we still had bedsits, people would be paying absurd amounts to live in squalid bedsits. The housing crisis wasn't caused by the ban on bedits, and won't be magically fixed by reintroducing them.
 
I never lived in Dublin but my first job was in Limerick in 1979 and I went through a few bedsits in my time there, all were fine, one was particularly nice, fine big bright room on first floor over an electrical shop mini kitchen in the corner, shared bathroom with two other bedsits.

Personally I much preferred that to having to share a house like I was living with those people, wouldn't appeal to me at all even these days.

It's a shame that upgrading wouldn't have been an option, I think they do have a place, ideally with a small bathroom tucked in but these days with pod type bathrooms you'd think it would be possible to have purpose built bedsit type accomodation which of course will be small but should be cheaper to rent too.
 
elcato said:
Anyone who is not nearing pension age or outside Rathmines never heard of them
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Yep, moved to Dublin in the early 2000s and lived in a variety of house/apartment shares and anyone I knew in Rathmines was living in a redbrick divided up into flats rather than bedsits. There was still plenty of squalor though.

(autocorrect insists that 'bedsits' should be 'bedsores')
 
Monbretia said:
It's a shame that upgrading wouldn't have been an option, I think they do have a place, ideally with a small bathroom tucked in but these days with pod type bathrooms you'd think it would be possible to have purpose built bedsit type accomodation which of course will be small but should be cheaper to rent too.
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The bedsit ban was implemented by legislation requiring every rented property to have its own bath/toilet facilities, which have to be separated from the rest of the property by a door, and also its own food cooking and storage facilities.

So, a single room with adjacent bathoom is perfectly legal, and always has been, as long as the bathroom is separated by a door. When people talk about bedsits being banned, they are talking only about bedsits in which bath, toilet or kitchen facilities are shared with people who don't live in the rented property, or bedsits where the bath and toilet are in the same room as the bed and the cooker.
 
BIG-notorious said:
As in fairness do massive mansions in leafy suburbs occupied by MCDowell and his ilk. Same way drug dealers fill a role in the justice system.
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There's a serious amount of inverted snobbery in this thread.

Like him or loath him McDowell is a very intelligent and capable person who has chosen to spend a large part of his life in public service. We need more people like him, of all political hues, not less.
 
fistophobia said:
Young people have it too comfortable these days.
I remember sharing a bedsit in Rathgar... there was frost on the inside of the windows.
We had candles.. if it got too cold, we lit one.
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Young people these days can't afford that. They have to keep living with their parents. I'm in my 50's and I can say unequivocally that my generation had it much easier than young people these days.
 
Purple said:
There's a serious amount of inverted snobbery in this thread.
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+1

I let it go yesterday but I thought that this was a particularly disgusting comment.

BIG-notorious said:
As in fairness do massive mansions in leafy suburbs occupied by MCDowell and his ilk. Same way drug dealers fill a role in the justice system.
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Fortune said:
Hmmm, census shows lots of preschool children in the country. Should we build some schools? Nah, there's enough room for all the kids on the schools right now. It's fine
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Good analogy; the really stupid policy of reducing classroom sizes has become a political Holy Grail, despite a shortage of teachers who are willing to teach, the very high capital cost of providing more schools and the fact that below a size of 30 there are very limited benefits to the students. The shortage of school places is an entirely manufactured and utterly unnecessary phenomena.
 
Guys

This could have been a good thread.

It's a pity that many of you got stuck into personal attacks and way off topic stuff.

If a post is off topic, don't reply to it, report it.

Brendan
 
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