It’s a while since I’ve written a blog post that wasn’t published somewhere, but without the luxury of a weekly newspaper to vent in sans commissioning editor, this is the place to write about something that is so starkly obvious now, nobody will commission it.

Two years ago we covered the capping of rent supplement in the Cork Independent, with some alarm. It was about two years after we had bought our own house (luckily, at the bottom of the market) and already, it was clear that we could rent it out for substantially more than the mortgage was costing us. The reason we bought in the first place was that rent in Cork was too expensive.

Over the two years it has become disturbingly clear just what that cap on rent supplement is costing. Landlords in negative equity are panicking and raising rents as the calls from the bank…