A property manager from Limerick has taken aim at members of government live on air telling them they need to "wake up" over a future exodus of landlords "coming down the tracks."
The comments were made on RTÉ's current affairs programme Upfront with Katie Hannon, where audience member and property manager Kersten Mehl criticised successive government and opposition policies on housing.
"Ten years of vilification and scapegoating of landlords, for what?" he said, addressing the panel of TDs Eoin Ó Broin, Neasa Hourigan and Paul McAuliffe.
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Mr Mehl, who has been running Kersten Mehl Property Management Limited for 16 years, told panel members that if there has been an exodus of landlords "it is nothing compared to what's coming down the tracks."
"For successive failures of government policies, going back 40 years to the 80s," he blamed.
He stressed that a £5,000 grant at that time led to local authority houses going derelict and politicians asking the private sector to take rent supplements like Housing Assistance Payment (HAP) and the Rental Accommodation Scheme (RAS), where landlords provide housing for an agreed amount of time through the local authority.
Mr Mehl added that he has up to 250 HAP and RAS houses and that there is "no structure" and "no policy" for them.
"On top of that, you have all these rent pauses, rent bans, rent this, rent that. My 90-year-old father has a great saying, if you stop hitting your head against the wall it stops hurting.
"You want to know why 35,000 landlords sold their houses?" he asked the panel on stage.
He claimed landlords were told that they wouldn't be able to sell their house and that his generation are terrified of Sinn Féin because of "what they saw."
"Ye would want to wake up the lot of ye, ye would want to wake up," Mr Mehl concluded.
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